


A Vampire's Bite

by JtheRapper



Category: BLACKPINK (Band), EXO (Band), GOT7, Stray Kids (Band), 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2020-12-07 19:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20981300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JtheRapper/pseuds/JtheRapper
Summary: Y/n is just your average girl with an unexpected adventure ahead of her. She goes to a local sundown party and wakes up to a mass vampire attack to discover her ex is infected and a vampire is on her side.





	1. Chapter One

Y/n woke lying in a bathtub. Her legs were drawn up, her cheek pressed against the cold metal of the faucet. A slow drip had soaked the fabric on her shoulder and wetted the locks of her hair. The rest of her, including her clothes, was still completely dry, which was kind of a relief. Her neck felt stiff; her shoulders ached. She looked up dazedly at the ceiling, at the blots of mold grown into Rorschach patterns. For a moment, she felt completely disoriented. Then she scrambled onto her knees, skin sliding on the enamel, and pushed aside the shower curtain.

The sink was piled with plastic cups, beer bottles, and askew hand towels. Bright, buttery, late summer sunlight streamed in from a small window above the toilet, interrupted only by the swinging shadows made by the garland of garlic hung above it.

A party. Right. She'd been at a sundown party. "Ugh." she said, her fingers on the curtain to steady herself, popping three rings off the rod with her weight. Her temples throbbed dully.

She remembered getting ready, putting in the jangling bracelets that still chimed together when she moved and the steel-toed oxblood boots that took forever to lace and were mysteriously no longer on her feet. Remembered the way she'd lined her e/c eyes in shimmering f/c and kissed her mirror for luck. Everything got a little blurry after that.

Levering herself up, Y/n stumbled to the faucet and splashed water on her face. Her makeup was smudged, lipstick smeared across her cheek, mascara spread like a stain. The f/c baby-doll dress she'd borrowed out of her eomoni's closet was ripped at the sleeve. Her h/c hair was a tangled mess that finger-combing didn't do a lot to fix. She looked like a dissipated mime.

The truth was that she was pretty sure she'd passed out in the bathroom while avoiding her ex, Taehyung. Before that there'd been some playing of a drinking game called The Lady or The Tiger, where you bet on whether a tossed coin would come up heads (Lady) or tails (Tiger). If you picked wrong, you had to do a shot. After that came a lot of dancing and some more swigs from a bottle of whiskey. Taehyung had urged Y/n to make out with his new sulkymouthed, strawberry-haired girlfriend, the one who was wearing a dog collar she'd found in the mudroom. He said it would be like an eclipse of the sun and the moon in the sky, a marriage of all things dark and light. You mean an eclipse of the sun and moon in your pants, Y/n had told him, but he'd been doggedly, infuriatingly persistent.

And as the whiskey sang through her blood and sweat licked her skin, a dangerously familiar recklessness filled her. With a face like a wicked cherub, Taehyung had always been hard to say no to. Worse, he knew it.

Sighing, Y/n opened the bathroom door—not even locked, so people could have been coming in and out all night with her right there, behind the shower curtain, and how humiliating was that?—and padded out into the hall. The smell of spilled beer filled the air, along with something else, something metallic and charnel-sweet. The television was on in the other room, and she could hear the low voice of a newscaster as she walked toward the kitchen. Jackson's parents didn't care about his having sundown parties at their old farmhouse, so he had one almost every weekend, locking the doors at dusk and keepin them barred until dawn. She'd been to plenty, and the mornings were always full of shouting and showers, boiling coffee and trying to hack together breakfast from a couple of eggs and scraps of toast.

And long lines fro the two small bathrooms, with people beating on the doors if you took too long. Everyone needed to pee, take a shower, and change clothes. Surely that would have woken her. But if she had slept through it and everyone was already out at a diner, they would be laughing it up. Joking about her unconscious in in the tub and whatever they'd done in that bathroom while she was asleep, plus maybe photos, all kinds of stupid stuff that she'd have to hear repeated over and over once school started. She was lucky they hadn't markered a mustache on her,

If Hoseok had been at the party, none of this would have happened. When they got wasted, they usually curled up underneath the dining room table, limbs draped over each other like kittens in a basket, and no other boy in the world, not even Taehyung, was bold enough to face Hoseok's razor tongue. But Hoseok was away at dance camp, and Y/n had been bored, so she'd gone to the party alone.

The kitchen was empty, spilled booze and orange soda pooling on the countertops and being soaked up by a smattering of potato chips. Y/n was reaching for the coffee pot when, across the black-and-white linoleum floor, just on the other side of the door frame to the living room, she saw a hand, its fingers stretched out as if in sleep. She relaxed. No one was awake yet—that was all. Maybe she was the first one up, although when she thought back to the sun streaking through the bathroom window, it had seeemd high in the sky.

The longer she gazed at the hand, though, the more she noticed that it seemed oddly pale, the skin underneath the fingernails bluish. Y/n's hearted started to thud, her body reacting before her mind caught up. She slowly set the pot back on the counter and forced herself to cross the kitchen floor, step by careful step, until she was over the threshold of the living room.

Then she had to force herself not to scream.

The tan carpet was stiff and black with stripes of dried blood, spattered like a Jackson Pollock canvas. The walls were streaked with it, handprints smearing the dingy beige surfaces. And the bodies. Dozens of bodies. People she'd seen everyday since kindergarten, people whom she'd played tag with and cried over and kissed, were lying at odd angles, their bodies pale and cold, their eyes staring like rows of dolls in a shop window.

The hand near Y/n's belonged to Jennie, a pretty, skinny, brown-haired girl who was planning to go to music school next year. Her lips were slightly apart, and her navy anchor-printed sundress ride up so that her thighs were visible. She appeared to have been caught as she was trying to crawl away, one arm extended and the other gripping the carpet.

Yugeom's, Jinyoung's, and Mark's bodies were piled together. They'd just gotten back from summer cheer camp and had started the party off with a series of backflips in the yard just before sunset, as mosquitoes buzzed in the warm breeze. Now dried blood crusted on their clothing like rust, tinting their hair, dotting their skin like freckles. Their eyes were locked open, the pupils gone cloudy.

She found Jackson on a couch, posed with his arms thrown over a girl on one side and a boy on the other, all three of their throats bearing ragged puncture marks. Al, three of them with beer bottles resting near their hands, as if they were still at the party. As though their white-blue lips were likely to say her name at any moment.

Y/n felt dizzy. The room seemed to spin. She sank to the blood-covered carpet and sat, the pounding in her head growing louder and louder. On the television, someone was spraying orange cleaner on a granite countertop while a grinning child ate jam off a slice of bread.

One of the windows was open, she noticed, curtain fluttering. The party must have gotten too warm, everyone sweating in the small house and yearning for the cool breeze just outside. Then, once the window was open, it would have been easy to forget to close it. There was still the garlic, after all, still the holy water on the lintels. Things like this happened in Europe, in places like Belgium, where the streets teemed with vampires and the shops didn't open until after dark. Not here. Not in Y/n's town, where there hadn't been a single attack in more than five years.

And yet it had happened. A window had been left open to the night, and a vampire had crawled through.

She should get her phone and call—call someone. Not her abeoji; there was no way he would be able to deal with this. Maybe the police. Or a vampire hunter, like Jisoo from TV, the swift, beautiful former idol always decked out in leather jackets and ripped jeans. She would know what to do. Her little brother had a poster of Jisoo in his locker, right next to pictures of pink cotton candy-haired Jimin, his favorite Coldtown vampire. Jungkook would be so excited if Jisoo came; he would finally get her autograph.

Y/n started giggling, which was bad, she knew, and out her hands over her mouth to smother the sound. It wasn't okay to laugh in front of dead people. That was like laughing at a funeral.

The unblinking eyes of her friends watched her.

On television, the newscaster was predicating scattered showers later in the week. The Nasdaq was down.

Y/n remembered all over again that Hoseok hadn't been at the party, and she was fiercely, so selfishly glad that she couldn't even feel bad about it, because Hoseok was alive even though everyone else was dead.

From far away in the guest room, someone's phone started to ring. It was playing a tinny remix of "Tainted Love." After a while, it stopped. Then two phones much closer went off almost at the same time, their rings combining into a chorus of discordant sound.

The news turned into a show about three men who lived together in an apartment with a wisecracking skull. The laugh track roared every time the skull spoke. Y/n wasn't sure if it was a real show or if she was imagining it. Time slipped by.

She gave herself a little lecture: She had to get up off the floor and go into the guest room, where jackets were piled up on the bed, and root around until she found her purse and her boots and her car keys. Her cell phone was there, too. She'd need that if she was going to call someone.

She had to do it right then—no more sitting.

It occurred to her that there was a phone closer, shoved into the pocket of one of the corpses or pressed between cold, dead skin and the lace of a bra. But she couldn't bear the idea of searching bodies.

Get up, she told herself.

Pushing herself to stand, she started picking her way across the floor, trying to ignore the way the carpet crunched under her bare feet, trying not to think about the smell of decay blooming in the room. She remembered something from her sophomore-year social studies class—her teacher had told them about the famous raid in Corpus Christi, when Texas tried to close its Coldtown and drove tanks into it during the day. Every human inside who might have been infected got shot. Even the mayor's daughter was killed. A lot of sleeping vampires were killed, too, rooted out of their hiding places and beheaded or exposed to sunlight. When night fell, the remaining vampires were able to kill the guards at the gate and flee, leaving dozens and dozens of drained and infected people in their wake. Opus Christi vampires were still a popular target for bounty hunters on television.

Every kid had to do a different project for that class. Y/n had made a diorama, with a shoe box and a lot of red poster paint, to represent a news article that she'd cut out of the paper—one about three vampires on the run from Corpus Christi who'd break into a house, kill everyone, and then rest among the corpses until night fell again.

Which made her wonder if there could still be a vampire in this house, the vampire who had slaughtered all these people. Who'd somehow overlooked her, who'd been too intent on blood and butchery to open every door to every hall closet or bathroom, who hadn't swept aside a shower curtain. It would murder her now, though, if it heard her moving.

Her heart raced, thundering against her rib cage, and every beat felt like a punch in the chest. Stupid, her heart said. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Y/n felt light-headed, her breath coming in shallow gasps. She knew she should sit down again and put her head between her legs—that was what you were supposed to do if you were hyperventilating—but if she sat down, she might never get up. She forced herself to inhale deeply instead, letting the air out of her lungs as slowly as she could.

She wanted to run out the front door, race across the lawn, and pound on one of the neighbors' doors until they let her inside.

But without her boots or phone or keys, she'd be in a lot of trouble if no one was home. Jackson's parents' farmhouse was out in the country, and all the land behind the house was state park. There just weren't that many neighbors nearby. And Y/n knew that once she walked out the door, no force on earth could make her return.

She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can't-see-monsters-monsters-can't-see-me. Neither of those impulses were going to save her. She had to think.

Sunlight dappled the living room, filtered through the leaves of trees outside—late afternoon sun, sure, but still sun. She clung to that. Even if a whole nest of vampires were in the basement, they wouldn't—couldn't—come up before nightfall. She should just stick to her plan: Go to the guest room and get her boots and cell phone and car keys. Then go outside and have the biggest, most awful freak out of her life. She would allow herself to scream or even faint, so long as she did it in her car, far from here, with the windows up and the doors locked,

Carefully, carefully, she pushed off each of her shining metal bracelets, setting them on the rug so they wouldn't jangle when she moved.

This time as she crossed the room, she was aware of every creak of the floorboards, every ragged breath she took. She imagined fanged mouths in the shadows; she imagined cold hands cracking through the kitchen linoleum, fingernails scratching her ankles as she was dragged down into the dark. It seemed like forever before she made it to the door of the spare room and twisted the knob.

Then, despite all her best intentions, she gasped.

Taehyung was tied to the bed. His wrists and ankles were bound to the posts with bungee cords, and there was silver duct tape over his mouth, but he was alive. For a long moment, all she could do was stare at him, the shock of e erything coming over her all at once. Someone had taped garbage bags over the windows, blocking out sunlight. And beside the bed, gagged and in chains, amid the jackets someone had swept to the floor, was another boy, one with mint green hair. He looked up at her. His eyes were bright as rubies and just as red.


	2. Chapter Two

At ten, Y/n watched her eomoni sit at her mirrored vanity and get ready to go to the party of an art buyer intent on lending her gallery a few pieces. She had a pencil skirt with an emerald-colored silk shell top, her short h/c hair gelled tightly back. She was fastening on a pair of small silver hooped earrings.

"Aren't you afraid of the vampires?" Y/n had asked, leaning bonelessly against her eomoni's leg, feeling the scratch of tights against her cheek and inhaling the smell of her eomoni's perfume. Usually, both of her parents were home before dark.

Y/n's eomoni had just laughed, but she came back from the party sick. Cold, they called it, which at first sounded harmless, like the kind of cold that gave you the sniffles and a sore throat. But this was another kind of Cold, one where body temperatures dropped, senses spiked, and the craving for blood became almost overwhelming.

If one of the people who'd gone Cold drank human blood, the infection mutated. It killed the host and then raised them back up again, Colder than before. Cold through and through, forever and ever. Y/n's eomoni was terrified. And so, two days in, once the shakes had gotten bad enough and the hunger came on, she agreed to be locked up in the only part if the house that would hold her.

Y/n remembered the screams rising from the basement a week later, screams that went on all day long, while her abeoji was at work, and then all through the night, when her abeoji turned up the television until drowned out every other sound and drank himself to sleep. In the afternoons after school, between bouts of screaming, Y/n's eomoni would call for her, pleading, begging to be let out. Promising to be good. Explaining that she was better now, that she wasn't sick anymore.

Y/n, please. You know I would never hurt you, my beautiful little girl. You know I love you more than anything, more than my own life. Your abeoji, he doesn't uunderstand that I'm better. He doesn't believe me, and I'm frightened of him, Y/n. He's going to keep me imprisoned here forever. He'll never let me out. He always wanted to control me, always been afraid of how independent I was. Please, Y/n, please. It's cold down here and there are things crawling on me in the dark and you know how much I hate spiders. Your my baby, my sweet baby, my darling, and I need your help. You're scared, but if you let me out, we"ll be together forever, Y/n, you and me and Jungkook. We'll go to the park and eat ice cream and feed the squirrels. We'll dig for worms in the garden. We'll be happy again. You'll get the key, won't you? Get the key. Please get the key. Please, Y/n, please. Get the key. Get the key.

Y/n would sit near the door to the basement with her fingers in her ears, tears and snot runnning down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Jungkook would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried whil they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Y/n's little bed. Make it stop, Jungkook said, but Y/n couldn't.

And when their abeoji put on chain mesh gloves, the kind chefs use to open oysters, and big work boots to bring their mother food at night, Jungkook and Y/n cried hardest of all. They were terrifed he would get sick, too. He explained that only a vampire could infect someone and their eomoni was still human, so she couldn't pass on her sickness. He explained that her craving for blood was not so different from how someone with pica might crave chalk or potting soil or metal filings. He explained that everything would be fine, so long as Eomma didnt get what she wanted, so long as Y/n and Jungkook acted normal and didn't tell anyone what was wrong with Eomma, not their teachers, not their friends, not even their grandparents, who wouldn't understand.

He sounded calm, reasonable. Then he walked into the other room and downed half a bottle of Jack Daniel's. And the screams went on and on.

It took thirty-four days before Y/n broke and promised her eomoni that she'd help her get free. It took thirty-seven days before she managed to steal the ring of keys out of the back pocket of her abeoji's tan dockers. Once Appa left for work, she unlocked the latches, one by one.

The basement smelled damp, like mold and minerals, as she started down the creaking, wooden stairs. Her eomoni had stopped screaming the moment the door opened. Everything was very quiet as Y/n descended, the scratch of her shoes on the wood loud in her ears. Her foot hesitated on the last step.

Then something knocked her down.

Y/n remembered the way it felt, the endless burn of teeth on her skin. Even though they weren't fully changed, the canines has still bit down like twin thorns or like the pincers of some enormous spider. There had been the soft pressure of a mouth, and pain, and there had been another feeling, too, as though everything was going out of her in a rush.

She'd fought back, screaming and crying, kicking her chubby little-kid legs and scrabbling with the nails of her pink child fingers. All that had done was make her eomoni squeeze her more tightly, make the flesh of her inner arm tear, make her blood jet like pumps from a water gun.

That was seven years ago. The doctors told her abeoji that the memory would fade, like the big messy scar on her arm, but neither ever did.


	3. Chapter Three

Taehyung's eyes were wide and terrified. He strained against the bungee cords, trying to talk through the tape. Y/n couldn't make out the words, but she was pretty sure from the tone that he was begging her to untie him, pleading with her not to leave him. She bet he was regretting that time he'd forgotten her birthday and also the way he'd dumped her via a direct message on Twitter and, almost certainly, everything he'd said to her last night. She almost started giggling again, hysteria rising in her throat, but she managed to swallow it down.

Sliding her fingernail under the edge of the duct tape, she began to peel it back as gently as she could. Taehyung winced, his chocolate eyes blinking rapidly. Across the room, the rattle of chains made her stop what she was doing and look up.

It was a vampire boy. He was pulling against his collar, shaking his head, and staring at her with great intensity, as though he was trying to communicate something important. He must have been handsome when he was alive and was handsome still, although made monstrous by his pallor and her awareness of what he was. His mouth looked soft, his cheekbones were soft, and his jaw curved, giving him an off-kilter beauty. His mint green hair was a mad forest of dirty curls. As she stared, he kicked a leg of the bed with his foot, making the frame groan, and shook his head again.

Oh yeah, as if she was going to leave Taehyung to die because the pretty vampire didn't want his snack taken away.

"Stop it," she said, louder than she'd intended because she was scared. She should climb over the bed, to the windows, and pull down the garbage bags. He'd burn up in the sun, blackening and splintering into embers like a dying star. She'd never seen it happen in real life, though, only watched it on the same YouTube videos as everyone else, and the idea of killing something while it was bound and gagged and watching made her feel sick. She wasn't sure she could do it.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid, said her heart.

Y/n turned back to Taehyung her hands shaking now. "Stay quiet, okay?"

At his nod, she pulled the tape free from his mouth in one swift rip.

"Ow," Taehyung said. Then he lunged at her teeth-first.

Y/n was reaching for the bungee cord restraining his wrist when it happened. His sudden movement startled her so much that she stumbled back, losing her balance and helping as she fell onto the pile of jackets. His blunt canines has grazed her arm, not far from where her scar was.

Taehyung had tried to bite her.

Taehyung was infected.

She'd made a noise loud enough to maybe wake a nest of sleeping vampires.

"You jerk," she said, anger the only thing standing between her and staggering panic. Forcing herself up, she punched Taehyung in the shoulder as hard as she could.

He let out a hiss of pain, then he smiled that boxy, rectangular smile that he always fell back on when he was caught doing something bad. "Sorry. I—I didn't mean to. I just—I've been lying here for hours, thinking about blood."

She shuddered. The smooth expanse of his neck looked unmarked, but there was lots of other places he could have been bitten.

Please, Y/n, please.

She'd never told Taehyung about her eomoni, but he knew. Everyone at school knew. And he'd seen the scar, a jagged mess of raised shiny skin, pale, with a purple cats to the edges. She'd told him how it felt sometimes, as if there was a sliver of ice wedged in the bone underneath.

"If you gave me a little, then—" Taehyung started.

"Then you'd die idiot. You'd become a vampire." She wanted to hit him again, but instead she made herself squat down and root among the jackets until she found her own purse with her keys. "When we get out of this, you are going to grovel like you've never groveled in your life."

The vampire boy kicked the bed again, chains rattling. She glanced over at him. He looked at her, then at the door, then back at her. He widened his eyes, grim and impatient.

This time, she understood. Something was coming. Something that had probably heard her fall. She waded through the scattered jackets to the dresser and pushed it against the door, hopefully blocking the way in. Cold sweat started between her shoulder blades. Her limbs felt leaden, and she wasn't sure how much longer it was going to be before she couldn't go on, before the desire to curl up and hide overtook her.

She looked over at the red-eyed boy and wondered if a few hours before he'd been one of the kids drinking beer and dancing and laughing. She didn't remember seeing him, but that didn't mean anything. There'd been some kids she didn't know and probably wouldn't have remembered, kids from Conway or Meredith. Yesterday, he might have been human. Or maybe he hadn't been human for a hundred years. Either way, he was a monster now.

Y/n picked up a hockey trophy from the dresser. It was heavy in her hand as she crossed the floor to where he was chained, her heart beating like a shutter in a thunderstorm. "I'm going to take off your gag. And if you try to bite me or grab me or anything, I'll hit you with this thing as hard as I can and as many times as I can. Understood?"

He nodded, red eyes steady.

His wax-white skin was cool to the touch when she brushed his neck to find the knot of the cloth. She'd never been this close to a vampire, never realized what it would be like to be so near to someone who didn't breathe, who could be still as any statue. His chest neither rose nor fell. Her hands shook.

She thought she heard something somewhere in the bowels of the house, a creaking sound, like a door opening. She forced herself to concentrate on unknotting the cloth faster, even though she had to do it one-handed. She wished desperately for a knife, wished she'd been clever enough to pick one up when she'd been in the kitchen, wished she had something better than a pot-metal trophy covered in gold paint.

"Look, I'm sorry about before," Taehyung called from the bed. "I'm half out of my head, okay? But I won't do it again—I would never hurt you."

"You're not exactly someone who's big on resisting temptation," Y/n said.

He laughed a little, before the laugh turned into a cough. "I'm more the run-toward-it-with-open-arms type, right? But really, please believe me, I scared myself too. I won't do anything like that again."

Infected people got loose from restraints and attacked their families all the time. Those kind of stories weren't even in the headline news anymore.

But vampires weren't all monsters, scientists kept insisting. Theoretically, with their hunger stated, they are the same people they were before, with the same memories and the same capacity for moral choice.

Theoretically.

Finally, the knot came apart in Y/n's hand. She scuttled back from the red-eyed boy, but he didn't do anything more than spit out the cloth gag.

"Through the window," he said. His voice raspy and held a faint trace of an accent of someone from Daegu—it made her sure he was no local kid infected the night before. "Go. They're swift as shadows. If they come through the door, you won't have time."

"But you—"

"Cover me with a heavy blanket—two blankets—and I'll be tucked in tight enough against the sun." Despite looking only a little older than Taehyung, the calm command in his voice spoke of long experience. Y/n felt momentarily relieved. At least someone seemed to know what to do, even if that someone wasn't her. Even if that someone wasn't human.

Now that she was out of range, she set down the trophy carefully, back on the dresser, back where it belonged, back where it would be found by Jackson's parents and—Y/n stopped herself, forced herself to focus on the impossible here and now. "What got you chained up?" she asked the vampire.

"I fell in with bad company," he said, straight-faced, and for a moment she wasn't sure if he was joking. It rattled her, the idea he might have a sense of humor.

"Be careful," Taehyung called from the bed. "You don't know what he might do."

"We all know what you'd do, though, don't we?" the vampire accused Taehyung in his raspy voice.

Outside, the sun would be dipping down toward the tree line. She didn't have time to make good decisions.

She had to take her chances.

There was a comforter on the bed, underneath Taehyung, and she started yanking on it. "I'm going for my car," she told both of them. "I'm going to pull up to the window, and then you'll both get in the trunk. I have a tire iron. Hopefully, I can snap the links with that."

The vampire looked at her in bewilderment. Then he glanced toward the door and his expression grew sly. "If you free me, I could hold them off."

Y/n shook her head. Vampires were stronger than people, but not by so much that iron didn't bind them. "I think we're all better off with you chained up—just not here."

"Are you sure?" Taehyung asked. "Yoongi's still a vampire."

"He wanted me about you and about them. He didn't have to. I'm not going to repay that by—" She hesitated, the frowned. "What did you call him?"

"That's his name." Taehyung sighed. "Yoongi. The other vampires, while they were tying me to the bed, they said his name."

"Oh." With a final tug she pulled the blanket free and tossed it over to Yoongi.

Her heart thundered in her chest, but along with the fear was the reckless thrill of adrenaline. She was going to save them.

There was a sudden scrabbling at the door, and the handle began to turn. She shrieked, climbing onto the bed and hopping over Taehyung to get to the window. The garbage bag ripped free with one tug, letting in golden, late afternoon light.

Yoongi gasped in pain, pulling the blanket ore tightly around him, turning his body as much behind another dresser as he could.

"Lots of sun still!" she shouted between breaths. "Better not come in."

The movement outside the door stopped.

"You can't leave me here," Taehyung said as Y/n shoved at the old farmhouse window, swollen by years of rain. It was stuck.

Her muscles burned, but she was pushed again. With a loud creak, the window slid up a little ways. Enough to get under, she hoped. The cool, sweet-smelling breeze brought the scent of honeysuckle and fresh-mowed grass.

Looking over at the lump of comforter and jackets and shadow where Yoongi was hiding, she took a deep breath. "I won't leave you," she told Taehyung. "I promise."

No one else was going to get killed today, not if she could save them. Certainly not someone she'd once thought she loved, even if he was a jerk. Not some dead boy full of good advice. And she hoped not herself, either.

Leaning forward, she ducked her head under the window frame, ignoring the splinters of worn gray wood and old paint. She tossed out her purse. Then she tried to shimmy a little, to get the swell of her breasts over the sill and cant her hips so that she could grab hold of the siding and pull herself forward enough to drop down headfirst into the bushes. It was a short, bruising fall. For a long moment, the sunlight was too bright and the grass too green. She rolled onto her back and drank in the day.

She was safe. Clouds blew across the sky, soft and pulled as cotton candy. They shifted into shapes of mountains, into walled cities, into opened mouths with rows and rows of sharp teeth, into arms reaching down from the sky, into flames and—

A sudden gust made the branches of the trees shiver, raining down a few bright green leaves. A fly buzzed in the grass near her shoulder, making her think suddenly of the bodies inside, of the way flies would be landing on them, of the opalescent maggots that would hatch and tunnel, multiplying endlessly, spreading like an infection, until black flies covered the room in a shifting carpet. Until all anyon ecolodges year was the whirring of their glassy wings.

Y/n started to shake like the trees, her limbs trembling, and was overcome by such a wave of nausea that she was barely able to twist onto her knees before she was sick in the grass.

You said that you were allowed to lose it, some part of her reminded herself.

Not yet, not yet, she told herself, although the very fact that she was renegotiating bargains with her own brain suggested things had already gotten pretty bad. Forcing herself up, Y/n tried to remember where her car was parked. She walked across the sloping lawn, toward a line of cars and then past each, touching the hoods, feeling as if she was going to vomit again every time she noticed stuff inside—books, sweaters, beads hanging off rear view mirrors—the small tokens of people's lives, the things they would never see again.

Finally, she got to her own 2006 Camaro, opened the door with a creak, and slid inside, drinking in the faint, familiar smell of gasoline and oil.

She'd bought it for a grand the day she turned seventeen and sprayed its scrapes with a can of lime-green Rust-Oleum, making it looked more like a vandalized cop car than anything else. She and her appa had rebuilt the engine together, during one of the few periods when he came out of his fog of misery long enough to remember he had two daughters.

It was big and solid, and it drank gas wait an unquenchable thrist. When she slammed the door shut, for the first time since she arrived at the party, she felt in control.

She wondered how long it would be before even that slipped through her fingers.


	4. Chapter Four

Driving across Jackson's lawn, Y/n ran over a coiled length of hose and crushed the daffodil patch that his eomoni had planted. Then she threw the Camaro into reverse and pulled up to the window as tightly as she could. As soon as her bumper hit the wall, she got out, climbed on top of the car, and tried to wriggle back through the window, this time holding a tire iron.

It took several tries and a lot of jumping and scrambling and kicking. When she did make it in, her calves and hands scraped, she realized that the room was darker than it had been. The shadows were lengthening as afternoon turned inexorably toward evening. It was probably after six, maybe after seven. The smell of death hung heavy in the air.

"Y/n," Taehyung said as soon as he saw her. "Y/n, they're going to come in as soon as it's dark. They told us." He looked pale and frantic, worse than she remembered him looking when she'd left. "We're going to die, Y/n."

"Condamné à mort," a voice rasped from the other side of the door. She could hear the creatures whispering to one another in the hall, shifting hungrily, waiting for the sun to set.

Her hands shook.

She whirled on Yoongi, who was watching her with those eerie garnet eyes, huddled in the corner like a mint crow. "What does that mean?"

"There are so many odd dappled patches of sunlight here," he called to them from his pile of blankets and jackets, ignoring her. "Come in. I long to watch your skin blister. I long to—"

"Don't say that!" she cut him off, panicked. If the vampires pushed their way in, she had no idea what she would do.

Run, probably. Abandon them.

Taehyung pulled against his bonds. "They keep talking to him in a whole bunch of languages. A lot of French. Something about the Thorn if Istra. I think he's in trouble."

"Are you?" Y/n asked.

"Not exactly," said Yoongi.

Y/n shuddered and looked back toward the window and her car with longing. The Thorn of Istra? She'd once seen a late-night special called Piercing the Veil: Vampire Secrets from Before the World Went Cold. On-screen, two guys in tweed jackets talked about their research into how vampires had stayed hidden for so long. Apparently, in the old days, a few ancient vampires held sway over big swaths of territory, like creepy warlords, with more vampires who, were basically their servants. Vampires took victims who wouldn't be missed, killing after every feeding. But if a mistake was made and a victim survived long enough to drink blood, it was a Thorn's job to hunt down that newly turned vampire and to kill anyone it bit during its short, savage life. Being a Thorn for one of the old vampires seemed to be half a punishment and half an honor.

On the program, the tweedy men had chuckled over how desperate those Thorns must have been once Caspar Morales started his world tour, all of them scrambling to put down an infection that had already spread out of control.

The Thorn of Istra had, apparently been driven mad by it. The special showed a grainy video of a meeting beneath the Père-Lachaise Cemetary in Paris. And while elegantly dressed vampires conducted business around him, the Thorn had been in a locked cage, his face and body streaked with blood, laughing. He'd laughed even harder when they found the videographer and dragged him up to the cage, howling wildly just before he bit out the man's throat. She'd seen the expressions on the pale faces of the other vampires. He'd frightened even them.

"The Thorn of Istra's hunting you?" Y/n asked. The thought of the thorn out of his cage was chilling. "But that's no problem?"

Yoongi was silent.

Maybe she should leave him. Untie Taehyung and get the hell out of there, even if it meant leaving one chained-up vampire to fend off however many were on the other side of the door. Even if it was unfair.

She took a deep breath. "Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?"

His expression turned very strange, almost as if she'd struck him. "Yes," he said finally.

Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead, too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, it she wasn't going to.

She walked over to Yoongi, her gaze tracing the configuration of his heavy chains. One was looked around the foot of the bed frame. His wrists had been manacled together in front of him with thick iron cuffs, those chains linked to the ones attached to another pair of cuffs, these on his ankles.

The easiest way to free him would be to lift the bed, something he could probably have done if his arms weren't restrained, but she wasn't sure she could do it. She was certain she couldn't do it with Taehyung still lying on the mattress, weighing the whole thing down.

"Do you think you can keep from biting me?" she asked him.

Taehyung was silent for a long moment. "I don't know."

Well, at least he was being honest.

She grabbed Yoongi's gag from a heap of things on the floor and climbed onto the edge of the bed. "You're not o far gone yet. Try," she told him. Bending down, she tied the cloth around Taehyung's mouth as quickly as she could, double-knotting it on the back of his head so that it would take a while to work free. At least she hoped it would.

He stayed still and let her. When she was done with the gag, she started unhooking the bungee cords restraining his legs. That went fast, at least; there were no knots. It did involve climbing over him in the bed, and despite the fact that he was Cold, despite the fact that they were in danger, Taehyung still managed to cock an eyebrow at her.

She was about to say something quelling when, on his left ankle, she found twin puncture marks with slight bruising around them, the blood itself taking on a bluish tone. She inhaled sharply but didn't say anything, didn't touch them. They seemed horribly private.

Then, because there was no way around it, she untied Taehyung's arms. He sat up, pushed himself back against the headboard, and rubbed at his wrists. His brown and green highlighted hair hung in his face, tousled, as if he'd just woken up.

Get them in the car, she told herself. Lock them in the trunk, get away, and figure out everything else from there.

"If you try tot ask off the gag, I'll hit you with this tire iron," she warned him, fetching it from the floor and waving it in what she hoped was a menacing way.

Since Taehyung couldn't talk, he made a sound that Y/n hoped was agreement.

"Okay, now you're going to help me detach Yoongi's chains from the bed," she said.

Taehyung shook his head vigorously.

"We don't have time to argue," she told him.

His shoulders lowered and he sighed through his nose. She gave him a long look, and then he moved reluctantly to brace his hands against the footboard. Y/n knelt down so that when Taehyung lifted the bed, she managed to pull the heavy chain free. She scooted out and Taehyung let go. The frame crashed back down, shaking the floorboards.

The vampire shifted, links pulling, the whole rattling thing making an eerie sound that reminded Y/n of medieval dungeons on late-night movies.

He lifted his arms, his cuffs still attached.

Taehyung tried to say something, but the words were muffled by the gag. Y/n guessed that what he had to say was sarcastic.

"There's a roll of garbage bags that were taped up on the windows," she said, poking around the floor at the collection of things the vampires had abandoned. "Maybe if we wrap some of those around you, then even if the blanket slips, you won't burn. We can duct-tape it together. As long as you don't mind looking ridiculous."

The vampire smiled a close mouthed smile.

Y/n passed the black bags and the tape to Taehyung. Squatting down in the shadows, Taehyung began half assing together some make-shift plastic armor for Yoongi. It looked silly as Y/n had promised, even before the blankets.

"If I'm hurt," Yoongi said as Taehyung worked, "you must be careful."

"We'll be careful," she told him. "Don't worry."

"No, Y/n, you must listen," he said. "You must be careful of me."

It was the first time he'd used her name, and the sound of it in his mouth, said with his accent, made it unfamiliar.

"We won't let you get burned," she said, turning away to open handbags and stick her fingers into the pockets of jackets, hoping against hope that one of her friends carried a knife. "Even though you're a vampire and you probably deserve it."

I'm sorry, she said to each of the dead as she unzipped and unfastened their things. I'm sorry, Jennie. I'm sorry, Mark. I'm sorry Chan. I'm sorry, Lisa. I'm sorry I'm alive and you're dead. I'm sorry I was asleep. I'm sorry I didn't save you and now I'm taking your things. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. There were no knives or stakes. The only things she found were a length of cord with several religious symbols from around the world knotted on it, including a large evil eye that glittered with crystals, and a small stoppered bottle of rose water with a piece of thorn-covered vine floating in it.

Y/n could use all the protection she could get. She took the water and the cord, stuffing them into her purse. Then she picked up Chan's cell phone. She dialed 911 and chucked it onto the bed.

Outside the door, a floorboard creaked.

"Little mouse," a voice said through the keyhole. "Don't you know the more you wriggle, the greater the cat's delight?"

Taehyung made a soft whining sound behind his gag. Y/n felt a wave of terror roll over her. It was all-consuming animal fear, vast and incomprehensible. There were things that could think and talk, and they still wanted to kill her and eat her. For a long moment, she couldn't move.

Then, pushing through the weight of her terror, she looked toward the window, where the first orange streaks of sunset were turning the trees to gold. The dark was coming.

"We have to go," she told Taehyung. He wasn't as done with covering Yoongi as she would have liked, but they'd run out of time. She lifted the tire iron and swung it at the window, smashing the pane and the wood rails and stiles.

Glass fell around her in a shimmering pile.

"We're going now!" she yelled. "Now! Taehyung, come one. Get Yoongi over here."

The operator was calling from the phone on the bed, her tinny voice sounding very far away. "What is your emergency? Anneyonghaseyo, this is 911. What is your emergency?"

"Vampires!" Y/n shouted, throwing down her boots and tossing the tire iron after them.

Taehyung helped Yoongi up, wrenching him to his feet. He was wrapped like some modern mummy, shining strips of duct tape holding together garbage bags and blankets, lurching toward the window. Y/n had no idea if it was enough to keep him from being burned, but it would have to do. Already, she was trembling with the urge to abandon all plans and just escape, slither out onto the lawn, and run—

"Taehyung, you go out the window first," Y/n said, cutting off her own train of thought, shoving down her fear. "Someone's got to be down there to take Yoongi's feet."

Taehyung nodded and swung his legs over the sill. He looked back at her fro a moment, as though trying to decide. Then he jumped, landing badly on the roof of the Camaro.

Behind Y/n there was the sound of splintering wood, as though something very large had hit the door. "No," she said softly. "Oh no. No."

"Leave me," said Yoongi.

Something struck the door again and the dresser fell over, crashing against the bed. Forcing herself not to run, she pushed the wrapped body against the window.

"Shut up or I might," she told him. "Now sit, swing your legs over, and drop."

He shifted his body, and Y/n braved herself to act as a counterweight to keep him from falling before he was in position. Taehyung stood under the window, catching his feet. Taking a deep breath and hoping the duct tape and blanket would hold, she let him go.

Taehyung eases Yoongi into the top of the trunk.

The door of the room cracked open behind her.

Keep going, she told herself. Don't look back. But she looked anyway.

Two creatures stood framed by the doorway—one male and the other female. Their faces were puffy and pink, bloated from all the blood they consumed. Their mouths and sharp teeth were ruddy, their eyes sunken, clothes stiff and stained dark. They weren't the slick vampires from television; they were nightmares and they were coming at her, wading through the jackets, flinching from waning pools of light.

Y/n scrambled for the windowsill, her body shaking, her hands trembling so ferociously that she almost couldn't get a grip on the wood frame. Going up on he knees, she threw herself forward, missing the car entirely and falling onto the lawn.

Fingers clamped down on her calf, pulling her back. She kicked hard, dragging herself forward with her arms. Teeth scraped against the back of her knee just as she pulled free and toppled away from the window. Behind her, there was a high, keening cry of pain. She hit the dirt, falling onto her back, the air knocked out of her. Dazedly, she turned to one side, looking out at a lawn sparklimg with shattered glass, as though someone had tossed handfuls of diamonds in the air after a heist.

"Jesus!" Taehyung shouted, his hands in hands in his hair. "You should have seen how that thing's arm got scorched. He nearly got you."

She staggered to her feet. The fresh scrape on the back of her leg burned and she started to shake all over again. "I think he did get me."

"What?" Taehyung took a step toward her and Y/n shook her head.

"Not now," she said. The car was right there. They were almost free. "Help with the trunk!"

Rolled up in the blanket, Yoongi looked like a body that a pair of murderes were planning to dump somewhere. He was lying on his side, body bent so that his back was turned to the sun. Together, Taehyung and Y/n heaved him up and off the car. But as they tried to carry Yoongi, Y/n stumbled and pulled the wrong way. The bags ripped, the cloth falling open. She slipped, tumbling onto the grass. For a moment, she saw his side and hand blackening in the sun, light seeming to eat away the flesh. Before she could think to do anything, Yoongi rolled over, turning his body so that the exposed part was pressed against the dirt, hidden from the light.

"Yoongi?" Y/n said, scrambling up, wrapping the blankets back around him,

He tried to stand.

Stumbling and exhausted and not very careful, they managed to open the trunk and dump Yoongi heavily inside. Taehyung slammed it shut, donning his bad-boy-about-to-do-a-bad-thing grin.

"Tae," she said, taking a step back, her voice coming out half as if he'd annoyed her and half as if she was afraid, which she was. "Taehyung, we don't have time. You have to get in there with him. I can't drive with you wanting to attack me."

"Have you looked at yourself?" he asked her, his voice odd, almost dreamy. "You're covered in blood."

She glanced down and saw that he was right. Her skin was dappled with shallow cuts, welling and streaking red down her arms and legs. A smear on the back of her hand where she'd wiped her face. It must have been fragments of glass from the window.

"We have to go, Taehyung."

"I'm not getting in the trunk with a vampire," he said, looking at her hungrily, his eyes black with desire, the pupils blown. "See, I'm controlling myself. You're bleeding and I'm controlling myself."

"Okay," she said, pretending to believe him. "Get in."

As he walked toward the passenger side, she picked up the tire iron and her boots. She knew what she should do—hit him in the back of his head and hope it knocked him unconscious—but she couldn't. Not with a house full of dead kids behind them. Not when she wasn't sure he would survive the blow. Not when she was shaking so hard she was about to shake apart.

She took a deep breath and made her decision.

"No, on the other side," she told Taehyung. "You're going to drive."

He turned back to her, brows knitted in confusion.

"It'll give you something to concentrate on other than biting me. And I can keep an eye on you." She held up the tire iron. "And we head where I say—understand?"

"I've been good," he complained.

"Get in!" she shouted, and somehow that, of all things, seemed to work. With a sigh, he walked around the front of the car. She got in on the other side and passed him the keys, holding the metal bar up with her other hand to show she'd use it if she had to. It was solid and smelled faintly of oil and hung comfortingly heavy in her grip.

Taehyung took a quick look at her face and turned the key in the ignition.

"Go," she said under her breath, like a prayer. "Go, go, go, go."

He pulled across the lawn toward the road. In the rearview mirror, the house looked like an ordinary clapboard farmhouse, except for the broken window and the bit of curtain fluttering through it, a lone and lonely ghost.


	5. Chapter Five

Taehyung had been the worst boyfriend in the world.

They'd met in art class, which Y/n had taken only because her friend Hoseok had promised her it'd be easy and full of other slackers. Hoseok was more or less right, as usual. Their teacher spent the time painting trompe l'oeils of arched windows leading into darkness-soaked rooms or somewhat grisly still lifes of rotting fruit, flies, and spilled honey. He sold the paintings in a gallery three towns over and told the class at length about how he needed the money since teachers' salaries sucked, especially in these dark times.

Basically, so long as everyone worked on some kind of project more or less quietly, he didn't bother any of them.

Hoseok decided that he was going to cut up yearbooks and create clothing designs from all the girls in class. He planned to frame it in the shadowbox and sneak it into the award cabinet once it was done.

Y/n was mostly doing nothing, drawing idly with charcoal, and talking with Taehyung.

He was just a cute boy in class back then, one with floppy brown hair with green highlights in his bangs that fell in his eyes when he talked, who wore clean band shirts with hoodies zipped over them, bright red converse, and a black-and-purple-checkered belt. He smiled a big boxy smile and laughed at his own jokes and told Y/n lots of stories about the unfathomable girls he seems to find himself dating. He seemed hapless and good-natured. He was always in love. He smelled like mens' cologne and kimchi.

Hoseok teased Y/n about him, and Y/n just laughed. She got why girls fell for him. He was charming, but he was so upfront about trying to charm her, so obvious, that she was sure she was immune.

Taehyung's project was a life-sized papier-mâché version of himself, posed like a model. He badgered Y/n into measuring him for it, and she rolled her eyes as she wound the tape around his upper arms and across the width of his chest.

When he grinned down at her, raising his eyebrows as though they were sharing a joke, she realized she wasn't immune after all.

He asked her out soon after, not on a real date or anything, just to hang out with some friends. And she went and had a few beers. When he kissed her, she let him.

"You're not like other girls," Taehyung said, pressing her back against the cushions of the couch. "You're cool."

Y/n tried to be cool, tried to act as if it didn't bother her when he flirted with anything that moved—and, that one time, when he was really drunk, with a coatrack. She'd heard all his stories about the possessive girl who texted him over and over again when he was just out with his cousin or the dramatic girl who sent him ten-page letters, smudged with her tears. She didn't want to be the star of another "crazy girl" story.

And it didn't bother her, not really, not in the way Taehyung seemed to expect. Sometimes it hurt to watch him with someone else, sure, but what she really minded was that he always seemed to be monitoring her for signs that she was going to scold him. She minded going to parties, where she made awkward conversation, drank a lot, and pretended that everyone wasn't waiting for her to pick some kind of giant fight with Taehyung. And she minded not knowing the rules, because any time she asked him about them, he just stammered elaborate conversation-ending-apologies.

When she suggested he go to parties alone, he would make an exaggeratedly sad face. "No, Y/n," he'd say. "You have to be there. I hate going to things by myself."

"You could go with friends," she'd suggest, laughing at him. Because it wasn't as if he was ever alone. He knew everyone. He had lots of friends.

"I want to go with you," he'd say, his eyes big and pleading, his mouth quirked in a little half smile, as though he was acknowledging how ridiculous he was being. And it worked. It always worked, that combination of flattery and little-boy silliness and, underneath it all, that fear Y/n had that she wasn't as cool as he thought she was.

So she went to parties and pretended nothing bothered her. And the more Y/n didn't say anything, the more outrageous his behavior got. He would make out with girls in front of her. He would make out with boys in front of her. He would wink at her across rooms, daring her to criticize him.

That's when things got kind of fun.

She schooled herself to even greater nonchalance. She'd walk over to Taehyung after he seemed to be finished kissing someone, curl her arm around his shoulder, and ask to be introduced. She'd assign points for style and take away points when he'd struck out. No matter what he did, she never let him see it bother her.

"You're playing some kind of game of sex chicken with him," Hoseok told her, pushing back a mass of bangs. "Who cares which one of you flinches first."

"Sex chicken," Y/n said, snickering. "Too bad we don't know anyone in a band—that would be a good name."

Hoseok whacked her with the magazine he was reading. "I'm serious. You know what I mean."

Y/n couldn't explain why she kept on with it, couldn't put into words the nihilistic thrill that came from suffering a little or the satisfaction of playing Taehyung's screwed-up game by his screwed-up rules and still winning. She was cool, and she wouldn't be uncool no matter how much he goaded her. While Taehyung sometimes seemed annoyed that she didn't hassle him, there were other times he told her there was no other girl like her. No other girl in the world.

"You can't win when someone else makes the rules," Hoseok warned her. Y/n didn't listen.

Then one night, at another party, Taehyung motioned her over and introduced her to the boy sprawled on the couch beside him. The boy's mouth was pink, and he looked a little drunk from the bottle of tequila in front of him and from the drowsy kisses he'd been sharing with Taehyung.

"This is my girlfriend, Y/n," Taehyung said. "You want to kiss her?"

"Your girlfriend?" The boy looked momentarily hurt, but he hid it well. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"

"How about you?" Taehyung asked her, challenging her. "Are you game?"

"Sure," Y/n said, her daring so tangled up with her determination that she wasn't sure which one made her agree. Her heart hammered against her chest. It felt scary, as if she were stepping across some invisible boundary, as if she might not know herself afterward. As if she were becoming the self she'd always thought lurked just underneath her skin. Her coolest possible self.

The boy's lips were soft.

When she looked up at Taehyung, the shock on his face went to her head like a shot of strong liquor. She was giddy with power. And when the boy kissed her back hungrily, she was giddy with that, too.

Taehyung leaned forward, and his expression had changed—he had that boxy smile on his face, like they were sharing a joke, just her and him, as if he got that all the parties were games of check and checkmate—as though Taehyung knew they were both doing this is in the hopes that the adrenaline might blow out every crappy think that had ever happened to them and he was glad she was with him, that they were together.

It made her think of a year before, when she'd stood alone on the tallest building in the city of Busan. Just stood there on the very edge and felt the wind blow through her hair as she looked down, sticking her foot of the building and in the air, leaning over just slightly, until her blood sang with fear, before she jumped down onto the flat of the roof.

It made her think of another day, when she'd flicked her lighter on and off, sitting in the bathtub of her room, burning pictures as the ran fell down outside the window.

He smiled at her as though he really believed she was special. As though only she had ever really understood what it was to take a dare for the sake of being daring.

But none of that turned out to be true, because Taehyung dumped her three weeks and a half-dozen parties later, with a message that said only, 'I think we're getting too serious & I want to take a break.'

After that, she wasn't sure what the game was or if she'd imagined it. All she knew was that she had lost.


	6. Chapter Six

Y/n directed Taehyung to pull the car into a gas station about an hour after they'd left Jackson's house. There were no other cars in sight, and these days all twenty-four marts had bulletproof-glass cashiers' booths, so she thought it'd be safe to stop. Full dark had fallen, her arm was starting to ache from holding the tire iron, and she was pretty sure she wasn't going to be able to keep it together much longer. Exhaustion was creeping up on her, her cuts stinging and her head throbbing. She hadn't eaten anything since she'd woken—hadn't even thought of eating—and each time her stomach growled, Taehyung looked over at her as though her hunger reminded him of his own.

It was hard to stay alert, hard not to be distracted by images of the farmhouse, of bodies, rising up behind her eyelids when she blinked, everything drenched in red. And along with that, the memory of the vampire's teeth scraping the back of her leg, his hand clamped on her calf.

She'd watched programs in health class talking about the spread of infection. There'd been an illustration of the human mouth and the vampire mouth side by side. She thought of it, illustrated in blue and yellow, pink and red. Vampire canines grew longer than their human counterparts', with thin channels that let the creature draw blood up through its teeth and into the back of its throat. When a vampire bit down, a little of its own fouled blood was pushed into the human bloodstream, causing infection. There'd been cases like hers before, cases where the teeth didn't fully penetrate. Sometimes people were fine, sometimes they weren't. If she didn't go Cold in forty-eight hours, she'd know her luck had held.

Taehyung pulled up to one of the pumps. "We can't keep driving without a plan. We've got to go somewhere."

"I know," she said, her panic-fogged mind going round and round, every possible move seeming worse than the last. She had no idea what to do next. All she knew was that she felt about ready to jump out of her skin.

As he opened the car door, a lock of hair fell into his eyes. He pushed it back, the way he'd always done. It seemed like such a normal gesture, when everything else was so not normal, when he wasn't normal, that she had to swallow past the lump in her throat.

He reached for the pump, selecting regular unleaded.

Y/n felt as though everything was happening much too slow and too fast, all at once. During the drive, she'd been afraid to talk, because if she started, she wouldn't be able to hold how she felt inside. She wouldn't be able to make him believe she was in control.

"We'll get a map and make a plan," she said, hoping he wouldn't see how tired she was. If she seemed weak, she might seem more like prey. She made her voice as steady as she could. "I'm going to the bathroom to get cleaned up first, though. I'll meet you in the mart after you're done with the gas."

From the trunk she heard a small thump. Yoongi was back there, waiting to be freed. But what would he do then? Were they supposed to just dump him by the side of the road and hope for the best?

"We'll be right back," Y/n called, and though she tried to control it, her voice quavered.

Slinging her handbag over her shoulder and grabbing her boots, she walked steadily away from Taehyung and the car until she got to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her and locking it. Before she could help it, she started sobbing. She cried and cried until she choked on her tears. She slid down the wall, crying so hard she could barely catch her breath. She slammed her fists against the loose linoleum tile of the floor, hoping the pain would shock her into calming.

Shock, Y/n thought. I'm in shock. But she didn't really know what that meant, only that it was bad and that it happened in the movies. In movies, people got over it quickly, too, usually with a slap to the face.

Standing, she slapped her own cheek and watched it become rosy in the mirror above the grimy bathroom sink. She didn't feel any different.

After long moments of standing there, staring at her reflection, she remembered that she'd said she was going to get cleaned up. She washed her arms in the sink, splashed water on her legs to rub off the blood. She couldn't see the scrapes on the back of her knee very well, but from what she could see, they looked not much different from her other scratches and cuts. They didn't seem swollen or discolored. They didn't seem deep. They didn't seem like anything at all, much less something that could turn her into a monster. She cleaned them with the antibacterial soap in the pump and shaking fingers, hoping that could kill any infection before it spread. Then she stood up, leaning against the locked door, and started lacing up her boots, pulling the ties tight.

When she was done, she called Hoseok.

Dialing the number was automatic, giving in to the temptation of momentary escapism. She couldn't think as the phone rang; her mind felt empty of everything but the feeling that if Hoseok answered, then she was going to be all right for a little while. Y/n didn't know what she was going to say, didn't even know how to put together words to explain where she was or what had happened. She'd been operating on instinct and impulsiveness at Jackson's farmhouse—get everyone out and worry about the consequences later. But later had come. It was waiting for her outside the door. She could only forestall it.

"Hello?" Hoseok's bright voice was loud and in the background. Y/n could hear music playing.

"Hey," she said, like everything was normal. It felt good to pretend. Muscles along her shoulders relaxed minutely. "What are you doing?"

"Hold on, I have to go in the other room. So much is going." A door shut on other end of the line and the music dimmed. Then Hoseok started telling Y/n the news about Leah, his kinda sorta girlfriend at dance camp. She had a boyfriend back home—a boy she'd been with since middle school—but she'd been giving Hoseok mixed signals all summer. Intense conversations and made-up exscuses to touch each other during improvs, followed by agonized hand-wringing. Her boyfriend was coming to visit Tuesday, but just that night Leah had kissed Hoseok. He was freaking out.

Y/n felt relief wash over her along with the familiar drama. She sagged against the door frame, tipping her head back and closing her eyes. She could have interrupted Hoseok, could have told him about the nightmare drive through the dark with the tire iron in her hand, told him about the vampires and the carnage and the scrapes of teeth. But if she did that, she would have to think about those things again.

So she listened to Hoseok tell her the story, and then they rehashed a bit, and when Hoseok asked her how she was doing, Y/n said that she was fine.

She was fine and the party had been fine and everything was fine, fine, fine.

"You sound weird," Hoseok said. "Have you been crying?"

Y/n thought about asking Hoseok to find an abandoned place with a door that could be barred and lock her inside with a few gallons of water and granola bars. Hoseok would do it for her; Y/n knew he would. And a week later, when Y/n begged and howled and screamed to be let out, maybe Hoseok would do that as well. It was too big a risk.

So Y/n insisted that she was really, really fine. Then Hoseok had to go because he had nine o'clock curfew and was leaving the common room to head to his dorm.

For long minutes after Y/n hung up and put away her phone, she tried to hold on to the feeling of normalacy. But the more she stood there, the more her stomach cramped with fear, the more she was aware of how her skin felt hot and cold at once.

She had to not be infected, that was all. She had to not be infected so she and Hoseok could move to Seoul after graduation as they'd planned. They were going to rent a tiny apartment, and Y/n was going to work as a producer and audition for companies with Hoseok. They were going to make it into a company and become big shot idols.

Finally, Y/n realized that she couldn't stay in the bathroom any longer. She opened the door, braced for an attack, braced for one of the vampires from the house to have followed her somehow, but there was no one and nothing—just a concrete lot and woods, lit by the food lamps over the gas pumps. The night was sticky warm, and in the distance she could hear the singing of cicadas. Not caring if it made her a wimp to hate the dark, she ran toward the brightly lit mart, only slowing when she was at the door. She jerked it open, wishing she hadn't left her tire iron in the car, even though she was sure they didn't let people bring stuff like that into regular businesses.

From behind the bulletproof glass, a clerk grinned at her like a man who wasn't too worried about his security. He had a mass of red hair sticking up from his head in gelled spikes.

There was a small television, mounted high up on one wall, showing a feed from inside the Ilsan Coldtown, where Lisa was introducing viewers to the newest guests at the Eternal Ball, a party that had started in 2004 and raged carelessly ever since.

In the background, girls and boys in rubber harnesses swung through the air. The camera swept over the dance floor, showing the crowd, a few of which had looping hospital tubes stuck to the insides of their arms. The lens lingering over a boy no older than nine holding out a paper cup to a thin blond girl. She paused and then, leaning down, twisted a knob on her tubing, causing a thin stream of blood to splash into the cup, red as the boy's eyes and the tongue that darted out to lick the rim. Then the camera angle changed again, veering up to show the viewer the full height and majesty of the building. At the very highest point, several windowpanes had been replaced with black glass, glowing, but designed to keep out the kind of light that could scald certain partygoers.

Y/n's scar throbbed and she rubbed it without thinking.

"Hey," Taehyung said, touching her shoulder and making her jump. He was carrying a bottle of water, but he stared at the screen as if he'd forgotten about everything else. "Look at that."

"It's like Hotel Seoul," Y/n said. "Or a roach motel. Roaches check in but they don't check out."

All infected people and captured vampires were sent Coldtowns, and sick, sad, or deluded humans went here voluntarily. It was supposed to be a constant party, free for the price of blood. But once people were inside, humans—even human children, even babies born in Coldtown—weren't allowed to leave. The National Guard patrolled the barbed-wire-wrapped and holy-symbol-studded walls to make sure that Coldtowns stayed contained.

Ilsan was the best known and the biggest Coldtown, with more live feeds, videos, and blogs coming out of there than from Coldtowns in much larger cities. That was partially because it was the first and partially because the South Korean government made sure that people trapped inside had power and communications sooner than those in the others. The outbreak in capital of North Korea had been contained so fast that the quarantined area never had a chance to evolve into a walled city-within-a-city. Tokyo was Ilsan's rival in live-streaming vampire entertainment, but blackouts were common, disrupting feeds and making regular viewing unrealiable. But Ilsan wasn't just the best known and the biggest, Y/n thought, looking at the screen. It was also the closest.

"It'd be a good place to hide out," Taehyung said, with a sly look at the car and the trunk with the vampire inside.

"You want to turn Yoongi in for a marker?" Y/n asked him. There was one exception to the whole not-being-allowed-to-leave thing, one way out of Coldtown if you were still human—your family had to be rich enough to hire a vampire hunter, who would turn in a vampire in exchange for you. Vampire hunters got a bounty from the government for each vampire they put in a Coldtown, but they could give up the cash reward in favor of a marker for a single human's release. One vampire in, one human out.

Even amateur hunters who turned in a vampire could get a marker. If Taehyung got one, then he could go into Coldtown and, if he stayed human, if he beat the infection, he could get out again.

"Not for a marker," Taehyung said, his eyes still on the screen. "For the cash. We could get some serious money from the bounty on a vampire. Enough for me to hole up for a couple of months in some crappy hotel and ride this thing out."

"I think I go—not bit, exactly." She blurted the words that she couldn't tell Hoseok, that she'd been afraid to say out loud. He needed to know if they were going to make real plans. "Scraped. With teeth."

That made him look at her, his eyebrows drawn together with actual concern. "And you don't know if you're going to get Cold."

"I have to assume I am." She tried to not let him see how scared she was, how her heart thundered to say the words. "We have to assume."

He nodded. "It'd be enough money for the both of us to hole up for a while. Two rooms, two keys. We could pass them under the door to each other when we were done. But we've got to do something. I'm hungry, Y/n."

"Yoongi helped us—" She stopped herself, unsure. The farther they got from the farmhouse, the more Yoongi seemed like a monster all on his own. She thought of his eyes, red like spilled garnets, red as poppies, red as the bright embers of a fire. She thought of what they taught in school: cold hands, dead heart. Plenty of vampires had forgotten how to feel anything but hunger. He'd helped her, sure, but that didn't mean she could trust him not to turn on her now that they were out of danger. Vampires were unpredictable. "At least that gives us a direction to head in. I'm going to grab some food. You should try to eat, too, and see if it cuts down the craving."

She waited for Taehyung to make some comment, but he turned to watch more images from Coldtown on the tiny television, his lips slightly apart, his cheeks flushed.

If she was a good person, she'd take him there. In case he gave in to the hunger. He might. And if he did, he'd be ageless, eternal. He'd be charming girls with his green highlighted hair until the earth crashed into the sun.

If she was really good person, she'd take herself there, too.

Y/n walked around the store, picking up a map with numb fingers. There were notices tacked to a board near the coolers: photos of teenagers with MISSING underneath and phone numbers, advertisements for guaranteed homeopathic remedies to ward off vampires, kittens free to a good home, and one notice reading only CALL MATILDA FOR A BAD TIME.

Y/n grabbed a root beer and then a bottle of water for later. At the deli case, she selected the least scary-looking sandwich—turkey and yellow cheese on white bread—and picked up two of them along with half a dozen packets of brown mustard, an apple, and a bottle of ibuprofen. Then she made herself a jumbo-sized coffee, emptying in a packet of hot chocolate for good measure.

Dumping her feast in front of the guy behind the bulletproof glass, she paid for that and the gas. She had about forty dollars left, the remainder of her last paycheck from her part-time job at the movie theater concession stand. Forty dollars and a very sketchy plan.

Y/n wasn't sure how much Taehyung knew about what going Cold was actually like, but if he was picturing himself in a hotel room, watching television, and sweating through it as if it were some kind of drug withdrawal, then he was picturing it all wrong. Once he was in the grips of hunger, he'd break down the door if he could. They'd attack each other. And then they'd attack other people, maybe even kill them. Spread the infection even further.

But if they weren't going to go Coldtown and they weren't going to hole up somewhere, their only choice was to turn around and go home. Drive Taehyung back to his house. Talk to his eomoni, a small, quiet woman in a housedress who made Y/n cups of tea when she came over and never commented on any outfits she or Taehyung wore. Y/n would explain that her son had gone Cold. Talk to his abeoji, whom Y/n had never met. Tell them—and then what? Were they really ready to confine Taehyung somehow and ignore his screams, knowing that if he got loose, someone would get hurt and they'd get arrested? Or would they ship him off to Coldtown anyway and pretend there were never any other choices?

And what about her? Where could she go to sweat out the infection? Not the basement, where her screams would echo off the walls as her eomoni's had. Not the basement, where Jungkook could hear her.

"Okay," Y/n told herself with a sigh, taking a big swing from her mocha. "Time to go."

Outside, the cool breeze blew back her hair and the bag of food swung from her hand. She was looking forward to sitting down and eating. Then, after she felt a little less light-headed, she would decide on a route.

As she headed across the station to her car, she noticed that the trunk of the Camaro was open.

"Taehyung," she said, her voice hushed.

Slowly, dread in her step, she crossed the asphalt.

The locking mechanism had been torn off and one of the hinges seemed loose, as though bent. Chains were coiled in a pile where Yoongi should have been, along with the remains of the blankets and black garbage bags.

"How did he—" Taehyung started, then stopped himself.

"He tore them," Y/n said, pointing to a metal link, warped out of shape, stretched and broken on one end. "If he did this, then he could—he could have always gotten free. Back at the house. He played us."

"Maybe they're weaker during the day," Taehyung said. "Like, this one time, I found a bag just sitting on the side of the bank in town in the middle of the afternoon. It was tiny and looked really miserable, so I stuck it in my shoe and brought it home. I thought it would be cool to have a pet bat, so I kept it in this old birdcage and it just chilled out. Until night. Then it wasn't docile anymore. It got out somehow and started flying around like crazy. When it spread its wings, it looked like it's giant, massive—"

"Tae," Y/n said. "He's not a bat." She stared at the mauled metal of the trunk and the way the chains were torn like tinfoil instead of steel.

He shouldn't have been able to do that. Vampires were stronger than humans, but not that strong.

"There's a reason people used to say they turned into bats," said Taehyung cryptically.

She sighed. Maybe he was right—in a way. Maybe like the bat in the birdcage, Yoongi had been waiting for dark, waiting to get out of the chains, drink Taehyung's blood, and escape. But when she showed up, he figured he could use them for a ride through daylight, so long as he seemed harmless enough to need saving. A chill crept up her spine.

"We'll, he's gone now. It's just you and me." Taehyung grinned lazily at her. It was the exact expression he always wore when he was about to talk her into something.

"Yeah," said Y/n. He kept staring and his expression shifted. She didn't think he was seeing her anymore. He was seeing skin and bone and blood. She toke a step back. The tire iron was on the passenger-side seat where she'd left it. She'd never reach it in time. "So lets get back in the car and keep going. Maybe find a hotel like you said." She was just taking, trying to say something that would distract him. "Hole up, like you said."

"Or we could give in to temptation." He shook his head slowly, coming closer. "Think about it."

"You don't mean that," she told him.

"Why not?" he asked, advancing. "It could be fun. There's people out there who'd kill for what we have."

"I don't want to be a monster," she said, stumbling away from him. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the gleam of a security camera mounted on the aluminum siding of the mart above the door. "Let's get in the car. You can try to convince me, I promise I'll give it serious consideration."

"Oh good," Taehyung said, and lunged at her.

She'd been half expecting it, given the way he was talking, but the attack still caught her off guard. He was her friend, and no matter how much she knew he wasn't safe, all her instincts pushed her to trust him. She threw the mocha she'd been holding, hoping the hot coffee would scald, and ran. His legs were longer, though, and he was faster. He tackled her, his weight bearing her to the asphalt. She felt his cool breath on her neck, and her knees and palms stung where she'd scraped them falling. The bag of food fell next to her, cracked root beer bottle frothing as the tide of liquid spread to soak the skirt of her baby-doll dress and mingle with spilled gasoline, washing away the spent stubs of cigarettes.

This is it, she thought, this is where I'm going to die. And it's going to be on film, watched by the clerk from behind his walls of glass, taped on camera and maybe broadcast later for her abeoji and namdongsaeng.

Taehyung made a sound like a gurgling scream, and Y/n winced, waiting for the inevitable pain. But instead of the blunt teeth, she felt him releasing his grip on her and heard him shout. She rolled onto her back, one hand reaching for the broken bottle, the only weapon available. Her fingers closed on it and she swept it out in a wide arc, hoping to hit skin.

Then she gasped.

Yoongi was standing in front of her, his arms around Taehyung's chest, his mouth on Taehyung's neck, his eyes shut. There was a terrible peace in his face as he lifted Taehyung off the ground, a terrible pleasure as his throat moved, drinking down swallow after swallow of blood. Tashyung's eyes were half open, heavy-lidded, and focused on the nothing. He wasn't struggling anymore, his mouth hung open in sensual bliss, his body shuddering with sensation.

For one long moment, Y/n couldn't move. It was more than the fear drawing attention to herself more than the fear of being hurt. She ought to be horrified, but she found herself mesmerized instead.

Taehyung moaned, low in his throat. Yoongi's fingers tightened, pulling Taehyung's body into his.

Slowly, painfully, Y/n pushed herself to her feet. Blood and gravel stuck to her knees and palms. Her once-f/c dress was filthy.

"Yoongi," she said as firmly as she could manage, and prayed her voice wouldn't shake. She thought of the way you were supposed to talk to wild animals, the way you couldn't let them know you were afraid. "Yoongi! Let him go."

He didn't move, didn't even seem to notice.

She grabbed his arm, half expecting him to whirl on her. "Please let Taehyung go. He's going to die!"

The vampire pulled back his head, eyes shut, fangs red, and mouth split in a wide, gummy grin. Then his eyes did open, bright as torches, and she stumbled back, terrified. Taehyung's body sagged from his arms to the pavement.

From the way Yoongi was looking at her, she wondered if he was thinking about the blood rising to her cheeks, of the way it pounded along with her speeding heart, the flush of it on her skin and the way it colored her lips.

It came to her, all of a sudden, the words he'd said to her in Jackson's house.

If I'm hurt, you must be very careful. No, Y/n, you must listen. You must be careful of me.

He hadn't been worried he was going to get hurt. He'd been worried that he was going to hurt someone else.

"Don't," she said, shrinking back, the jagged bottle stem she still had clenched in her hand seeming hopelessly inadequate, a bright piece of glass and nothing more. "Please."

Yoongi wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of one hand. "Come, Y/n. The night is young and your friend is very tired. We should make him a bed—a cap of flowers and kirtle, embroidered all with leaves of myrtle." His voice sounded odd, abstracted.

She bent down to where Taehyung was lying and touched his chest. It rose and fell as if he was, indeed, only sleeping. "Is he going to—will he live?"

"No," said Yoongi. "No chance of that. He wants to die, so he will. But not tonight and not because of me."

"Oh," Y/n said. "So he's okay?"

Under the floodlights, Yoongi's skin looked nearly white, his mouth stained red despite his rubbing it. It was the first time she'd seen him standing and again she was struck by the incongruity of him—tall, bare feet, ripped jeans, and a black T-shirt turned inside out, messy mint green hair, chains gone, looking like the shadow of a regular boy, ably her age, who wasn't a boy at all.

And there was a body slumped at his feet.

"Yes," he said, reaching out a hand. "But you're hurt."

She looked down at herself, at the mess of her dress and the mess of her knees and the mess of everything. "I haven't had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone's dead and my root beer's gone." Horrifyingly, she felt her eyes prick with sudden tears.

He bent down and picked up Taehyung, slinging him over one shoulder. "We'll get you another day," Yoongi said, with such odd sincerity that she had to smile.


	7. Chapter Seven

Y/n could barely keep her eyes open. Yoongi was at the wheel, having taken the keys from Taehyung's pocket after depositing him in the backseat. Y/n should have protested, but she'd let him get in on the driver's side, let him turn the key in the ignition. She'd gathered up the bottle of water and the two sandwiches, still wrapped in plastic, brushed off the grit, and eaten them while they sped along the road, headlights picking out the dark shapes of trees and houses. The windows were down, and Yoongi's hair blew around his face like frayed mint ribbons.

She didn't know where they were going, only that they were driving away from her former life and into a distorted fun-house-mirror version of it.

After the food, she felt sleepy as if she'd been drugged. It was the adrenaline draining away, she was pretty sure, the terror receding. She tried to convince herself that she wasn't safe, that she was in a car with a vampire who, in addition to being a vampire, was talking like a crazy person, but her body didn't seem to have any more fight in it.

She blinked a few times, trying to stay awake. "What was going on back at the house? Those chains—why didn't you get out of them before, if you always could?"

"I killed someone—a vampire—and I was exhausted and—" He stopped and looked at the road for a long moment. She studied his features, the androgynous, exaggerated beauty of his pouting lips and lashes so heavy they made him seem like he was wearing eyeliner. "My mind is—not as it was. There is a madness that comes over us when we're starved and carved, a madness that can be that it would take a river of blood to wash away all my wounds. I struggle for my most rational moments. I could have gotten out of the chains, yes, but it would have cost me."

Which meant it had cost him, later, in the trunk of the car, when he was already burned.

"You don't seem crazy," she said. "Well, you don't seem that crazy."

The side of his mouth lifted in a half smile. "Some of the time, I'm not. But the rest of the time is most of the time. And when I am, unfortunately, I am all appetite.

"They left me there with the tied-up boy, saved for the following night, like a sweet on the pillow. I was still waiting for it to get closer to dark when you came in."

Y/n watched the shadows shift across his face along with the lights from the road. She wondered if he could smell her blood, drifting from her pores along with her sweat.

She guessed that he'd planned on draining Taehyung before he escaped, even if he didn't say so out of some sense that it was bad manners.

She wondered if Yoongi thought about biting her—his face, turned to the road still, was as calm as a statue of a saint in a cathedral, It she had seen him with Taehyung. She had seen the way his fingers dug into Taehyung's skin and how the muscles in his neck strained, and when he'd looked at her, mouth painted with blood, his gaze hadn't tracked. She wondered what it would be like to be infected and to give in, to let herself be turned, to be ageless and frozen and magic and monstrous.

There were so many girls and boys running away to Coldtown, who would do anything to have the infection burning through their veins the way it burned through Taehyung's. The vampires inside were incredibly circumspect about biting people—that's why all the pictures of them feeding inside Coldtown showed them feeding from tubing and shunts. More vampires were a drain on the food supply. What Taehyung had—what she (maybe) had, too—was rare and desirable. There was a girl Y/n had met, a friend of Hoseok's, who cut thin lines on her thighs with razor blades before she went out to clubs, so that a vampire might be drawn to her.

When she looked at Yoongi's mouth then, it was still stained carmine along the swell of his lower lip. Maybe because he'd saved her at the gas station and she was feeling grateful or because she was so tired, she found herself fascinated with his mouth, with the way it curved into a sinner's smile. She knew she was looking at him like a boy, like a gorgeous boy whose smile could be admired, and that was dangerous and stupid. She didn't even know if he thought of her as a girl at all.

She needed to stop thinking about him like that. Ideally, she should stop thinking about him entirely, except as something dangerous. "Why were they after you—those men and the Thorn? Was it bad, what you did?"

"Very bad," he agreed. "An act of mercy that I regret—endlessly, I regret it. I had a tutor once who wanted me to believe that mercy is a kind of sorrow and that since evil is the motive of sorrow, evil is also the motive of mercy. I thought that my tutor was old and cruel, and maybe he was—but now I think he was also right."

"But that doesn't make sense," Y/n said, leaning against the cushioned headrest. "Mercy can't be evil. It's a virtue—like kindness or courage or . . ." Her voice trailed off.

He turned to look at her. "This is the world I remade with my terrible mercy."

She shook her head. "That doesn't make sense, either." Then, helplessly, she yawned.

He laughed, sounding like any boy from her school. She wondered what color his eyes had been long ago. "Go to sleep, Y/n. Lean back your seat. If you let me borrow your car for tonight, I promise I will repay you."

"Oh yeah?" she asked, looking at him, with his bare feet and plain, dark clothes. "With what?"

The smile stayed on his lips. "Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of things long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief."

She was almost sure he was joking. "Okay. So where are we going?" she asked, her head nodding against the window.

His voice was soft and raspy. "Coldtown."

"Oh," she said, blinking herself awake again.

"I must. But if Taehyung comes through the gates with me, he'll be safer and you'll be safer without him. They'll hunt for him out in the world. And he's likely to start hunting, too."

"But what if he doesn't want to be a vampire?" Y/n asked. As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized that he would want it—of course he would want it. Didn't he say as much before he attacked her? Being a vampire would get him all the glory he could ever imagine—he wouldn't just be known a the guy at a party most likely to seduce someone else's girlfriend/boyfriend or the small-town boy yearning for a big city. In Coldtown, he would be drowned in attention—and the massacre at the farmhouse would make his story only more tragic. More romantic.

Plus, Taehyung was hungry.

She was the one who didn't want to be a vampire. And she was afraid that as time went on, she'd become less and less sure of that.

"The fever is in his blood," Yoongi said. "He looks for no cure but one. I think he has decided in his heart, but who can confess to such a decision?"

"It's hard to fight the infection," Y/n said, her voice coming out harsher and more despairing than she'd intended. She didn't want to talk about her eomeoni. She didn't want to tell him that the fever might be in her blood, too. In a few hours, she could be as bad as Taehyung. "They can't. You don't understand. It takes them over and they can't think straight."

He said nothing in return. In that silence, she realized how stupid she was being. He must have been infected once, must have given in to it, must know better than she did how it felt.

"If you go to Coldtown," she said, hoping to change the subject, "you won't be able to get out. Are you sure whatever you're going there for is worth it?"

"What's that?" he asked suddenly, one hand leaving the wheel to touch her arm.

"What?" she said, looking down.

His long fingers traced the outline of the scar just beneath the crook of her elbow, his expression unreadable. Her skin felt too warm against the coolness of his touch, as though she were feverish. "These are old marks," he said finally. "You were just a child."

"Should it matter?" Y/n asked. She was usually careful, but she must have pushed up the sleeves of her dress.

"Why would death discriminate between age and youth, you mean?" he asked calmly. "Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die."

She was relieved he hadn't asked her any of the awful, stupid questions she'd grown used to: Who bit you? I heard that it doesn't hurt when you're bitten—does it hurt? Did you like it? Come on, you're lying, you did like it, didn't you? But then, he must know most of the answers. "Seems like Death came back for me."

He grinned, a subtly gummy grin that somehow made her smile back. "You drove him off again. Sleep, Y/n. I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him. We have been adversaries for so long that we are closer than friends."

"I'll just close my eyes for a minute," she said. "It's not even really that late."

There was something else that she wanted to say, something that she was sure she was on the verge of saying, but the words were swallowed up by the night.

Y/n awoke to the sounds of voices. She was alone in the car, spread out across the front seat, head pillowed on her arm, one of her booted feet kicked up against the glass of the driver-side window. The pleasant scent of coffee in the air mixed with car exhaust. And she let chilled through, as though she'd kicked off a blanket in the middle of winter.

For a moment, waking up seemed like a nice thing to do. She remembered a party and being worried about going alone, where she was sure she was going to run into Taehyung. She heard his voice outside the car, though, so it must all have worked out. Except for memories that seemed to be part of a nightmare—stuff that couldn't be real. Blood and empty eyes and a shimmering rain of shattered glass.

Then everything came back to her in a rush and all her muscles clenched with instinctive alertness. Her heart sped and she scrambled in her seat, kicking the wheel in her eagerness to be upright.

Her Camaro was parked in a lot, far from the central cluster of cars and trucks. In the distance she saw a large, sprawling building, blinking bulbs and glowing floodlights announcing it as DEAD LAST REST STOP OPEN 24 HOURS. The sheer gaudy brilliance of it made the outer edges of the lot seem even darker by comparison.

She'd never been there before, but she knew the place, the same way she knew South of the Border. Kids at school wore T-shirts emblazoned with the logo or plastered its bumper stickers on their cars. The Dead Last Rest Stop was as flashy and famous as it was because of its proximity to the first Coldtown.

They'd come a lot of miles while she'd slept.

Yoongi was sitting on the hood of her car, a paper bag and a steaming cup beside him. His head was covered by his hood and, shadowed as his face was, he looked like a pale human boy and not a monster at all. Taehyung stood with his hands in his pockets, talking to two people she didn't know. He must be reeling with infection, but he seemed to be hiding it well, his voice only a little unsteady. The pair were a girl and boy, one's hair dyed the vibrant deep red of crimson and the other's was dyed a dirty blonde. They looked so alike yet different that Y/n thought they must be siblings.

"You sure you can give us a ride? I mean, thanks, of course, but I just want to make sure you're serious," the boy was saying. His hair was razor-cut in the back and sprayed into a shaggy, teased mop, with longer pieces framing spiky bangs. His eyes were lined with kohl, and two single silver hoops were in each of his ears. "Out here in the dull world, we're just a couple of kids without any cash, but inside it's all about barters and favors and who you know. Jisoo is tight with lots of people through her blog, so we're going to be set up when we get to the city. We brought plenty of stuff to trade and we've got a plan. So we could help you if you help us."

Taehyung smiled. "Definitely." He looked back at the car, toward Y/n. She wasn't sure if she could get out. It was bad enough that he was promising people rides.

The girl—Jisoo—touched Taehyung's shoulder. "Reckless," she said, as if there were no higher compliment. Her hair was much longer than her brother's, reaching down all the way to her waist. She wore skinny jeans with a blue velvet top and grubby, worn converse. Two rings on her fingers and small silver hoops through her ears. "We're part of this one network for people who are planning on going to Coldtown. We used to post all the time about meeting our destiny. Claiming all the stuff that normal people don't want. We'd talk and talk and talk, but how many of us actually did anything? We say that you've got to be willing to die to be different. I bet you believe that, too."

The boy pointed at Taehyung. "You don't even know him, Jisoo. He could be doing this on a total whim. He might not be serious. He could be high. He could be balk. Look at him. There's something wrong with his eyes and he's sweating."

Jisoo rolled her eyes, sarcasm in her voice. "That's a nice thing to say about someone who's offering us a ride." She looked at Taehyung. "Don't mind Bambam. He's overprotective."

"So are you willing to die to be different?" Taehyung asked them, and Y/n heard the hunger in his voice.

"For sure," she said. "I wanted to go last year, but Bambam didn't want to be sixteen forever and I had to admit it was kind of lame. So we compromised. We're going to be eighteen in a month and that seemed old enough to go."

Jisoo and Bambam, Y/n thought. She knew that the names had to be fake and that the way they looked was an elaborate artifice, but they wore their strange beauty like war paint. They made an intimidating pair.

Bambam looked down at his calf-high boots, buckles running back and forth over the length of them, frowning as though he wanted Jisoo to give Taehyung a different answer. A long metal chain ran from his belt loop to his back pocket; he twisted it around one finger idly, in the same fidgety way that his sister bit her lip.

"I'm going to blog the whole thing," Jisoo said. "That's how we're going to pay for stuff after our trade goods run out. I've got a tip jar on the site, and there are ads and stuff—my readership was already pretty good, but it's gone through the roof since we ran away. A hundred thousand unique visitors are watching Bambam's and my adventure. We made a promise to each other—and to them."

"No more birthdays," they recited more or less at the same time, then flushed and laughed a little. It was a vow, a piece of a chant, their scripture, something they took so seriously that's saying it aloud embarrassed them.

"Because you're planning on dying and rising again?" Yoongi said from atop the car hood. They glanced at him in surprise, as if they'd forgotten he was there. His face was shadowed enough to hide his eyes, but his unnatural stillness should have unnerved them.

"I just posted about our Last Supper," Jisoo said, taking her phone and holding it out to Taehyung, leaning closer than she had to. "It's kind of tradition. Before you go through the gates, you eat one last meal. All your favorites. See, Bambam had kimchi, spicy chicken ramyeon, and bubble tea. And here's the picture of mine—black noodles with my own bubble tea. I was so excited that I only took a bite of each. You know, like how you get one last special meal of your choosing before you go to the electric chair."

Last meal. Because they were hoping to die, Y/n realized.

She saw how Taehyung's gaze drifted over Jisoo's skin. She really was beautiful, with large black eyes and all that deep red hair, with her silver hoop earrings glinting in the light. He grinned as if what she'd just said was very funny.

He was going to bite her.

Y/n got out of the car, slamming the door behind her. They all looked over, Jisoo frowning at having her conversation interrupted.

"Taehyung," Y/n said warningly. "Everything okay?"

He turned toward her, a strained smile relaxing into a real one as she got closer. He shrugged and threw an easy arm over her shoulder. "Jisoo, Bambam, this is my girlfriend, Y/n."

Jisoo took a step back from Taehyung. Bambam looked at Y/n in a way that told her just how bad she must appear in her ripped and filthy dress, hair sticking up all over the place.

"I'm not—" Y/n started, pulling away from him.

But Taehyung was still smiling. "And she's worried because I'm sick. I'm Cold. She's worried I'm going to bite you, and she should worry because I want to bite you. I want to real bad."

At that, Yoongi looked up again, his gaze catching Y/n's. She couldn't read his expression, but she could tell he wasn't pleased. One of Jisoo's hands flew up to cover her mouth, chipped silver nail polish and rings on her fingers.

Bambam studied Taehyung's face. "You really are, aren't you?"

"He was bitten last night," said Yoongi, leaning forward, mint hair hanging in his face. "He can control the hunger now, for short periods, more or less, but it will become worse. He has maybe another day or two before he ought to be restrained."

Y/n expected Taehyung to give some response, but he was quiet. Maybe he hadn't realized it would get worse. Y/n thought of her eomeoni screaming up from the basement and shuddered.

She thought of the way her skin had felt chilled when she'd woken. She wasn't sure why Taehyung hadn't said anything about the possibility of her being Cold—whether he was being nice or whether he figured they would be less impressed if it wasn't him alone who was dangerous—but either way she was grateful.

"Can I interview you?" Jisoo asked Taehyung, pulling out her phone and fiddling with it, opening some app. "For the blog? Can you describe what it feels like—the hunger?"

"Careful," Bambam said, putting his hand on his sister's arm.

Y/n could see that Jisoo wasn't listening. Her mouth was slightly open, fascinated, a mouse in love with a snake.

"Come on," Jisoo said to Taehyung, losing her cool affect entirely. She bounced on her dirty red converse. "Please. I've never talked to anyone experiencing what you are. I am so curious—and my readers would be super curious, too. It must be amazing to have all that power running through your veins."

"It's like you're hollow," Taehyung said, looking into the camera as if he was ready to devour all the viewers, looking as if he were an understudy for one of those online vampire celebraties. "Hollow and empty, and there's only one thing that matters."

"I can't believe this is happening," Y/n said, walking over to Yoongi.

He held out a cup to her, the one she'd seen beside him on the hood when she woke. His black shirt was stretched tight against his chest, and he had crumpled paper bag resting beside him. "They say a long sleep is the best cure for all sickness."

She took a long swallow of the coffee. It was too bitter no touch of cream at all, as though it had been mixed by someone who had no idea what it was supposed to taste like—someone who hadn't tasted food in a long while. She reached for the bag. "What's in here? Doughnuts?"

He turned away, as though he didn't want to watch her open it. "Take it. That's for you as well."

The bag turned out to hold a necklace of silver chain with a single ring hanging from the center point. The silver clasp on the back was broken, as if though it had been ripped from someone's throat, and the ring itself was slightly rusted, but the silver and black pattern still shined. It rested on a bed of loose bills, some ink-stained, some smeared brownish-red, some single dollars and some twenties mixed in with a few euros, all jammed together in a messy pile.

"Where did you get all this?" she asked.

At that moment, Jisoo screamed. Y/n whirled toward them and felt Yoongi's cold hands closed around her. Frozen fingers dug into her skin just below her rib cage. His grip was so firm it was like being held by a bronze figure.

Jisoo was on the ground, her phone tossed to one side, her hands scrabbling to push Taehyung away. He crouched on top of her, pushing her velvet shirt off her shoulder. Bambam had hold of one of Taehyung's arms and was trying to pull him backward.

Y/n's feet kicked out ineffectually against the car bumper as she was dragged up into the air. She felt Yoongi's chest against her back, smooth and chilled as stone. She felt the icy curve of his jaw where it rested against the top of her head.

"Hush, Y/n," Yoongi said, sliding his cheek downward over her hair, so that he could murmur against her throat. Terror overwhelmed her, vast and animal. Her body took over, twisting and writhing and clawing. It was like being in that dark basement again, her eomeoni's cold lips giving her one final kiss.

"Hush," he said. "It's almost over."

"No!" Y/n shouted, struggled uselessly. "No, no, no. I have to help him. Get off of me."

Then, suddenly, he did, hands sliding free of her. She staggered away, nearly falling to her knees.

Bambam had let go of Taehyung's arm in preference for pulling him away from Jisoo by his hair. Taehyung's head lashed back and forth, Jisoo's hand up under his jaw, pushing him away from her. But he was close, close enough for his teeth to snap just above the bare skin of her arm. His fingernails raked at her shoulder, making bloody runnels.

Her screams spiraled up into the night air.

For a moment, Y/n's mind was blank. Then she rushed over, crouching down, so she could dig her hands into Jisoo's armpits and haul her up.

Taehyung looked at Y/n, and for a moment, it was clear he thought she would help him. Then she scuttled away, pulling Jisoo as hard as she could, and he snarled in comprehension.

Taehyung went for Jisoo's legs, but she was fast enough to kick him in the chest, hard. Even though she was wearing only converse, he stumbled to one knee, gasping, one hand held out as if to ward off more violence.

Bambam looked his arm around Taehyung's neck and held him like that. For a moment, Taehyung's body went slack, then he brought up his shaking fingers, stained red. He was about to lick them clean. Y/n leaped forward, grabbing his wrists and pulling him toward her, wiping his hands against her dress. She wasn't sure how much human blood would turn him, but she didn't want to take any chances.

Taehyung started to laugh, a choked sound with Bambam's arm against his throat.

Jisoo sobbed softly, red soaking her torn shirt, turning the blue velvet to black.

Y/n looked at Yoongi. He was watching her with half-lidded eyes of glittering scarlet, an intent and covetous stare.

"You didn't do anything," she accused, pointing a trembling finger. He swayed slightly toward the scene of the carnage, like a tree bending in the wind, as if she had beckoned him. "You could have stopped him and you just let it happen."

"It's dangerous to go to Coldtown infected but not yet turned." His voice was distant, but something in the way he moved his mouth, some languorousness, showed that the blood in the air and feel of her struggle against him had ingenuity his desire to feed. "It would have been safer if you'd just let it happen. Every new vampire born in Coldtown compromises the blood supply. There are only so many donors."

"It's dangerous to be infected anywhere," Y/n said. "I just don't want him to die."

"One way or another we all wind up dead," Yoongi said, his eyes on Taehyung."

But then he bent and picked up the coffee cup from the ground, bringing over the remaining liquid to wash off Taehyung's fingers. Y/n knelt on the cool asphalt of the parking lot, carefully scraping Jisoo's skin from underneath Taehyung's nails with her own.

"Buzzkill," Taehyung said, his normally low voice even lower. Cold sweat dampened the green and brown bangs across his forehead. He grinned up at Yoongi, his head lolling against Bambam's arm now, as though there were no more fight in him.

"You owe me," Y/n told Taehyung. "I hope you know just how much you owe me."

Leaning over them, Yoongi's face was no longer shaded, his eyes catching the blinking lights of the rest-stop sign, his skin too pale to belong to a living human.

Bambam stood abruptly, freeing Taehyung and backing away from the vampire.

"Something the matter?" Yoongi asked him.

Taehyung stretched out, looking up at the stars.

Jisoo pushed herself to her feet a little unsteadily, wiping tears off her face and smearing her black mascara. She saw Yoongi and froze as her brother had.

"Red as roses—yes, those are my real eyes. An I not what you've been looking for?" Yoongi's smile was gummy one with all teeth. "I have been here all along waiting for you to notice. I can give you what you want. I can give you endless oblivion."

"Stop it," Y/n said, hitting him on the shoulder, continuing to pretend he was regular person who wasn't scary in the hopes he'd forget, too, continuing to pretend she had any power at all in this situation. "Stop it right now. I've had enough of everyone attacking everyone."

Her words seemed to break the spell he'd had over Bambam, who put his hand on his sister's unhurt shoulder. "We should get you to an emergency room."

"No hospital," Jisoo said groggily. "I just need bandages—we can get them inside."

"Jisoo," said Bambam. "Please. Let's go home."

She looked at him with wide, black, furious eyes. "We have everything we need right here."

Y/n looked toward Taehyung, still staring dazedly up at the stars. He was breathing faster, as though he couldn't quite inhale fully. One of his hands was pressed to his heart. He barely seemed to notice when she called his name softly.

"Go with them," Yoongi told Y/n, sitting down beside Taehyung and pushing up the sleeve of his own hoodie. "Since you wish it, I won't let him feed on the living, but there's no reason he can't drink from the dead. It will curb his hunger. Go, Y/n. We'll be here when you return."

She went.


	8. Chapter Eight

The inside of the Dead Last Rest Stop was huge, bigger than most malls, but with services malls would never have any reason to provide—showers for a dolllar; canned goods; a boutique with sepulchral dresses and coats in black and purple and silver; a pharmacy; an interfaith chapel; five restaurants; three bars; a dance club; and even a bag check so that people arriving by bus could pay two dollars to dump their luggage for a couple of hours while they shopped or slept in rentable coffin-shapes pods. Loud Eurotance remixes of funeral music pumped out of speakers all along the walls, and every store window announced the same thing, whether in big, blinking letters or hand-lettered signs: OPEN 24 HOURS.

Y/n felt dazed. It was surreal to be inside of a brightly lit space, safe, when she'd been in mortal danger for the last twelve hours.

Jisoo walked past Y/n and collapsed on one of the benches. Both her hands pressed the velvet cloth of her shirt over the scratches to stop the bleeding.

"I'll get the bandages and stuff," said Bambam. "You stay right here. And you stay with her." He scowled at Y/n.

Y/n nodded and Bambam walked toward the pharmacy, looking back twice. His big boots clopped like hooves on the shiny granite tile floor.

A few passing kids wearing backpacks stopped to stare at Y/n in her bloody clothes and at Jisoo, with her smeared mascara and the way she was clutching her shoulder.

"What are you looking at?" Y/n told the kids, snarling the way Hoseok would have, and they hurried off.

Jisoo smiled at her lopsidedly.

"I'm so incredibly sorry," Y/n said. "About what happened. I'm sorry you got hurt."

"How did you . . . how did you wind up with them? With Taehyung and the other one?" Jisoo asked. Her lips looked chapped and bluish under the fluorescent lights.

"There was a party and everyone died," Y/n said. She didn't expect it to come out quite like that, quite so plain and awful.

Jisoo nodded and closed her eyes, as if the scratches stung. "How bad? It wasn't that thing that was on the news up north . . . ?"

The news? For a moment, Y/n was confuse. It felt like something too private for the news, but of course that didn't make sense. "I don't know. Maybe."

"It was! Oh my god, I saw all the tweets and the pictures someone leaked of the crime scene. You were really there?"

Y/n nodded, not sure what else to say. She had no words for it that were big enough.

"Wow," Jisoo said. "And you got away. That's major."

"More or less, we got away." said Y/n.

"Hey, do me a favor, okay?" Jisoo reached into her pocket with one hand and and took out her phone, the face of it scratched from the pavement. "How this while I talk. My tripod is in my luggage, but I don't want to bother getting it. This is the real stuff—the stuff I promised to tell everyone. Just try to hold it steady."

"Sure," Y/n said, somewhat taken aback. It wasn't as if she hadn't taken video of anyone before—of Hoseok so he could see how his dances looked or of friends acting stupid and goofing around—but she'd never filmed anyone who'd just been attacked and was still bleeding.

"And you could say something, too. You should. Everyone wants to know what it's like to be you right now."

Y/n shook her head quickly; the idea of talking about what had happened brought back every awful image. The staring dead eyes. The whispering voices through the door. Her back slammed against the ground of the gas station with Taehyung towering over her. "I don't know, myself."

"Later maybe," said Jisoo, handing the phone to Y/n. "How do I look?"

Y/n had no idea how to answer that. Jisoo looked pale and beautiful, streaked and bloodied. "You look fine," Y/n said, as neutrally as possible.

"I guess that's going to have to do." Jisoo winced as she pulled on the ripped neck of her velvet shirt, exposing her collarbone so Y/n could get a good shot of gouges. They were grisly, wet with blood, and swollen at the edges. "You know how to use this thing?"

Y/n touched her fingers to the phone, hitting the small picture of the video on the bottom corner. "I think so. Aren't you worried your parents are going to see this? Let the cops know where you are? I mean, you're underage runaways."

Jisoo snorted. "Our parents don't get what we do online. They're not smart enough. They're nothing like us. Trust me, by the time they figure out what happened, we'll be long gone."

"Okay," Y/n said, holding up the camera and clicking the button to begin filming. Ready."

"Hi," Jisoo said, an odd intensity coming over her as she gazed into the lens. "It's me, faithful servant of the night, adventurer, poet, and madwomen. And what an adventure I've been on! Lots has happened since I posted last. Bambam and I made it to the rest stop outside of Coldtown, so we're less than an hour from being inside. It's exactly like what we always believed—when you're following your own deepest, truest, darkest destiny, the universe clears you a path. We met some people who are going to give us a ride. In fact, you might recognize them from the news—but I'll get to that later. First, I have to tell you about what happened to me."

Then Bambam returned with a bag of medical supplies. Jisoo asked Y/n to keep the phone recording as Bambam bound up her shoulder, spraying the wounds with antiseptic and taping up her gauze bandages. She narrated all the while, eyes on the camera, even when it obviously hurt. When that was done, Jisoo gulped down some aspirin and said she wanted to edit and upload the video to her blog before she did anything else.

Listening to her, Y/n had to admire the way Jisoo was able to turn what happened into a madcap story, into part of the Legend of Jisoo. Even the not-so-good stuff was spun on its head to be enviable. Y/n could imagine herself watching the video and wishing she was brave and lucky as the girl in it. But standing in front of Jisoo, knowing what had actually happened, Y/n could see that Jisoo wasn't just telling a story to other people, she was telling a story to herself. She was smoothing over all the frightening parts until she wasn't scared. But she should be, Y/n thought. She should be scared.

"There's free Wi-Fi throughout the building—I'm just going to plug into the outlet over there." Jisoo pointed toward the foo court. Taking the phone out of Y/n's hand, grinning, she aimed the camera part at her. The corner light flashed. "Meet me when you're done with whatever. You don't mind, right? You didn't say anything."

Y/n was sure she looked awful, but a bad picture online was the least of her problems. She felt worn out, cold, and brittle. She could smell Jisoo's blood, a metallic scent, and wondered if that meant the infection had finally kicked in. Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe she should stop worrying.

"No, I guess I don't mind." Y/n glanced over at a display of logo shirts. "I'm going to pay to take a shower."

Bambam gave her an almost friendly smile, the first since Taehyung had attacked his sister. "That's a good idea. Who knows how much hot running water we're going to get inside."

Y/n wanted to say that she was still making up her mind about Coldtown, but she hesitated too long and then felt foolish. She waved an awkward good-bye instead.

The gift store was kitschy, full of shot glasses, bumper stickers, and T-shirts—baby tees with CORPSEBAIT across the front, big black sleep shirts with dripping letters: UP ALL NIGHT AT THE DEAD LAST REST STOP, I BITE ON THE FIRST DATE, THE DEADEST GENERATION, NOTHING IS THE NEW EVERYTHING, and I'LL TAKE MY COFFEE WITH YOUR BLOOD IN IT. There were mirrors with cartoonish rivulets of blood running from two puncture wounds silk-screened onto them, so that when you looked in the mirror, it seemed as if you'd been bitten. And there were necklaces, spelling out the word cold in looping cursive letters.

There seemed to be an argument between a woman and the clerk. Y/n left before she could hear it get out of hand.

The next store was a boutique and Y/n immediately searched for a sale rack and found it. On the rack was many dresses and jeans, but Y/n came across the perfect outfit for real cheap. It was a pair of ripped black jeans, a white tee, and jean jacket with fur on the inside and it came with a pair of tan timberlands. She got that and purchased a pair of cheap underwear. She smiled with relief at not having to buy a dress, she wasn't willing to face an actual vampire while wearing a hilarious slogan nightshirt. And all she wanted to do with her current clothes was set them on fire.

She took her purchases in their glossy black boutique bag with purple tissue paper wrapped around each garment and went to the showers. There, she was able to pay a dollar for fifteen minutes in an individual stall and three dollars for packets of body wash and shampoo, a tiny toothbrush kit, and a towel only slightly larger than a washcloth that had to be returned.

A large mirror hung in the hallway outside the stalls, where women and girls sat on benches, lacing up Chucks and rolling on deodorant. Seeing herself, she stopped to stare at her reflection as though the girl in the glass was someone else, someone unknown and unknowable. Her h/c hair looked wild, with bits of twigs and leaves stuck in it. The skin around her eyes was dark as a bruise, probably half from sleeplessness and half from smeared mascara that she made worse when she'd splashed her face with water. Even her e/c looked dull under the harsh overhead lights. Her once f/c dress was as bad as she'd guessed, brown at the hem where the root beer had soaked into it, striped with dark streaks of blood and dirt. There were at least two visible rips in the fabric, and her high boots were spattered with grime and mud.

But the worst part was her expression. She made herself try to smile, but it came out wrong. She'd once seen a bunch of vintage mug shots in a magazine and there'd been one she'd stared at for a long time. There'd been something off about the girl in it. Now Y/n saw that strangeness in herself.

She wasn't okay. She really, really didn't look like someone who was okay.

Going into the stall, Y/n hung her pocketbook, towel, and bag of clothes on the hook farthest from the nozzle, unlaced her boots and tied them together, so they could hah with her other things. Then she pulled off her eomeoni's baby-doll dress, her bra, and her underwear and tossed them into a corner. Her muscles felt stiff and sore, her hands fumbling over the most basic tasks.

When the hot water hit her shoulders, it felt so good she groaned out loud.

She washed her hair twice and combed it through with her fingers to get all the twigs out. She scrubbed her skin with her fingernails, not caring if it abraded, caring only that she was clean. The water cut off after her fifteen minutes were up and she leaned back against the tiles. Her heartbeat hammered against her chest in alarm, but nothing was wrong. It was just leftover terror.

She didn't fell chilled through anymore. She didn't want to attack the woman in the next shower stall. She felt exhausted and scared and scraped up, but other than that, she felt pretty much the way she always had. She felt fine.

She thought about Taehyung out in the parking lot and about Yoongi's bare arm. If Taehyung drank enough of Yoongi's blood, maybe he'd be better for a while, but they were just buying time in scraps and tatters.

It had been almost seven hours since the vampire's teeth scraped her leg. Too soon to let herself hope she'd be okay, but she found herself hoping anyway. She thought of her own bed in her own room and imagined herself curled up there, her cat sleeping on her face and Jungkook doing her homework in the next room. She thought of bright light streaming through the windows and her phone ringing because Hoseok wanted to go to the pool hall where the cute guy worked to play game after game of darts as they'd done all last summer, scoping him out between throws. And she thought of how, once Hoseok and the guy finally dated, they'd all snuck back in there one night with Taehyung and thrown stuff at the board—first kitchen knives, then forks, and even broken pieces of a glass someone had dropped.

It had turned into an oddly surreal night, but not as surreal as this one.

After a few moments, she forced herself to dry off as much as she could with the small towel and to step into her new clothes, tossing the old ones into the boutique bag. She pulled the shirt overtop her crimson red bra and then pulled on the blue jacket. Then came the ripped jeans overtop the matching red underwear and then the tan timberlands.

She reached into her purse to see if she had a comb and some lipstick—anything to make herself seem less sickly—when she noticed that her phone was flashing. She had six new messages. She must have turned her ringer off at some point at the party and not remebered to turn it back on.

Stepping into dressing area, she put the phone back into her bag and found a comb to draw the tangles out of her hair. As wavy as it was, it would tangle again fast, but at least she'd look a little less messy. Maybe by the alchemy it would make her feel less of a mess, too. She brushed her teeth in the sink, over and over again until her gums bled.

Then she listened to the messages.

The first one was from her abeoji, giving her hell for not coming home in the morning. The next was from abeoji again, asking her where she was, saying the police had called. Then there was a message from Jungkook, twelve-year-old arrogance dripping from his voice, saying that Appa was worried and that he was sure Y/n was fine, but could Y/n call please, because listening to him was boring. Then there was a call from police officer, leaving a number, saying that he understood she'd been at a party the night before and he needed to talk to her. Then her brother again, saying to please, please, please call; this time he sounded frightened.

The last message was from her abeoji.

"The police have been to the house," he said. "They described to me what happened at the party and how only three kids, in all probability you and two others, managed to get away. Since you haven't come home or tried to contact us, I'm assuming that you've been infected." There was along pause. When her abeoji resumed speaking , his voice was unsteady. "Thank you for staying away, Y/n. It's the responsible thing to do, and I hope that no matter what happens, you leave us—especially Jungkook—with our memory of you the way it was. We love you, sweetheart, and we'll miss you, but please don't come back here. Don't ever come home."

For a moment, she was tempted to call home anyway, to tell them that she was okay while she still could, to say something cruel to her abeoji to get him back for leaving a message like that, to at least text Jungkook.

You leave us with our memory of you the way it was.

Y/n deleted the messages and put her phone away.

She'd decided. She was going to Coldtown.

With the dollar and change she had left, she bought a slice of pizza and ate it, sitting on a plastic chair in the food court. It tasted like sawdust and cardboard. Across the way at a nearby table, some boys in muscle tops were shoving one another in a good-natured way.

"We should do what other countries do and blow those corpses sky-high," said one of them, leering at two girls with purple pigtails and black lipstick who were passing the table. "Bomb all the Coldtowns."

One of the girls turned around and flipped dual middle fingers at him. "Hey, idiot, you want to fight the vampires? Move to Europe or America. Too bad about the skyrocketing infection rate there."

"Maybe I will. I'll have my own show—Slade Slays—and kill every vampire there is. How about that?"

"How about it's called Slade Dies," called the girl. "That show I'd watch."

All the other boys at the table started laughing.

Y/n got up and threw away her grease-smeared paper plate. Then she walked over to where Bambam and Jisoo were sitting by the outlets. Jisoo with her head bent over her laptop, earbuds cords hanging down her neck. Bambam looked up at Y/n and blinked a couple of times, pulling off his bulkier headphones, his dirty-blonde hair flattened where he mussed it. She noticed for the first time the T-shirt he was wearing underneath his black jacket—it had the words COLDER THAN YOU across the front in small white letters.

She snorted.

"Wow," he said. "You look much better."

"Thanks." She made a face. "You still want that ride? I'd understand if you decided not to take it."

Bambam touched Jisoo's arm, making her look up. "We better talk about it. I think maybe—"

"We want the ride," Jisoo said firmly, in a tone that dared her brother to contradict her.

He didn't.


End file.
